I decided last night to finally head out and start looking for a freeway to compose a slow shutter exposure of freeway lights. It was an interesting project. One of the things that I immediately noticed is just how much I don’t notice any more. Things that you just take for granted. Where I live in the USA, they have guard rails and safety fences around every bridge (to make suicide more difficult and pedestrian accidents near impossible).
I had to do a lot of hunting around for the right freeway, and then I had to step off of the sideway and on to the dirt to get the angle that I was looking for. Unfortunately, the shot I wanted to take just wasn’t possible since they actually put up signs that said “Pedestrian traffic prohibited” so if I got stopped by a police officer while taking my photos I would have ended up with a misdemeanor citation. And while I am interseted in pushing my photography experience, I’m not interested enough to pay fines to get that experience. I’m reasonably happy with the reasults and will probably aim to do this kind of thing again in the future with other overpasses.
I ended up driving to 4 different over passes looking for one that I could get both a good angle on the freeway and also one that did not have “pedestrians prohibited” signs put up. Once I found it, then I had to figure out how to navigate the parking lot (which was actually segmented in to at least 4 separate parking lots with limited ingress-egress access) to get closest to where I was going to set up my camera. Then I had to patiently wait at my car while a pedestrian who I passed 3-4 times in the search for the right parking lot entrance finally crossed over the bridge (i.e., overpass) I’d settled on. I think I made him a little nervous driving around him as he walked solo through a poorly lit parking lot (or two). Finally, he was gone and I had my parking spot, so I humped my gear up to the overpass, dithered about stepping off the sidewalk on to the dirt that led down to the freeway below, and erected my tripod to begin.
With a dozen or more photos of the same scene at different shutter speeds and different traffic compositions, this is the is the one that I ended up liking the most. The yellow lights that stutter along the path are signal lights to indicate the driver was changing lanes. You can even see the lane change in the path of the tail lights.
I’m about you bore you with technical photography comments, if you can’t wait to move on, skip to the next paragraph. This is a 12.5% crop (resized) of an original 15 second exposure. The original size photo shows a lot of “bounce” to the tail lights. I’ve driven this freeway before (tail lights are West-bound I-580) and it’s a rough freeway, but I never realized just how rough (thank God for shocks, eh?). After re-sizing, the “bounce” is almost eliminated, which is nice. The exposure wasn’t extended enough in retrospect. I was really aiming for the landscape to show up with the same visibility as the photo below.
This is much more of what I was aiming for, but I didn’t get my exposures correct in the first few photos. After looking at this, I realized that I could crop it and remove some of the extraneous elements that draw the eyes away from the composition.
This is a better crop because it eliminates the cars in the upper right in the original photo, and it also removes the tops of the bushes in the lower right.
It was a fun experience and I look forward to doing it again in the future.
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