If you look around Flickr you’ll find groups dedicated to light painting and traffic light trails. The manipulation of light is very popular amongst photographers, I guess that is because it offers the photographers even more control over the content of an image.

Living in a rural area you don’t tend to get the opportunity to take many shots of traffic a night, but my recent trip to Hong Kong seemed like an opportune moment to try something new. I was staying with a friend that didn’t live to far from pretty busy roads which looked ideal. We waited till about 10-11 by which time it was as dark as it was going to get in a city full of lights and headed off to a bridge to get a good vantage point.

To do light trails you should be looking at extending your exposure time for as long as possible. The best way to do this is to drop the ISO and close up the aperture to a high f-stop. One factor I hadn’t thought about was the background light; nearly every sign in Hong Kong lights up, all the shop have their lights on and street lighting covers the rest. this meant even with my ISO at 100 and aperture at 22f I couldn’t get an exposure of more than 10 seconds, meaning my light trails were weak, so we called it a night.

A couple days later we thought we would try again, but this time chose a busier road with less background light. The images definitely came out better this time, but needed some serious work in Aperture to get them to a good standard. A couple tweaks to the curves and changes to things like the colour temperature, I managed to achieve something that was half decent.

With this experience in mind I decided it was time to order a neutral density filter for my camera. From past experience I had learnt that buying filters can become expensive, especially when you have more than one lens of different sizes. So I took the decision to order a Cokin P series holder and some filters to use with it; the idea being I will now be able use all my filters on all my lenses. This along with my recent move to a house that conveniently has a bridge that crosses a dual carriageway only 100m down the hill means that I might just be having another crack at making some light trails soon.