One of my favorite looks... Light trails! I shot this Sunday evening on my little photo adventure above Lake Tahoe. This was actually the shot I had in mind when I set out, but bonus, I got a few other cool shots that evening too. I already posted one HERE and I'll be posting the rest soon.

These light trails were created by cars driving along the windy shoreline of the lake. A long exposure is the trick to getting this type of shot. The exposure was 222 seconds long. You can also tell it's a long exposure by the movement of the stars in the sky that made little streaks. This was shot at 8:32 pm, the sunset happened at 7:45 pm according to the SunMoon app, a favorite of mine for quickly checking sunrise and sunset times. I like shooting light trails about 45 minutes or so after sunset, that way you still get a rich blue color to the sky. If I were to wait longer, the sky would be black and not quite as interesting to me.

This was shot on a Canon 5Dsr with a 24-105mm lens set at 70mm. The ISO was 400, a somewhat light sensitive ISO that doesn't get as much digital noise (the grainy look) as higher ISOs can. The aperture was f5. There was no specific reason I chose that aperture, it was just the best setting that worked with the 222 second long exposure.

A tripod and shutter release cable were used in order to keep the camera as still as possible. A polarizing filter and a graduated neutral density filter were also used. I wanted to try to bring out a little more blue to the lake with the polarizer but it probably could have been skipped. The graduated neutral density filter was used to darken the sky a bit in order to balance out the sky's exposure with the lower part of the scene.

Editing this type of shot is a little tricky and would be hard to explain via text, but the work was done in Photoshop's Camera RAW editing feature. The shadow detail was increased, the color was balanced, and the light trails were worked on a bit by reducing the brightness of the yellows and oranges in the shot.

The creation of this photograph can be seen in my latest @dtube video at the 9:01 mark. Check it out if you want to see me talking a little more about this shot: VIDEO

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When I recently gave a photography presentation/workshop at the Las Vegas Steem Creators Conference, I talked about the compositional element of "movement". This shot would fall into that category, the movement of the cars definitely adds a cool subject matter. The shot could also fall into the category of "action" shot. Speaking of action... yesterday's @photogames game is asking you to post a favorite action shot that you took in the comments of the @photogames post. This is not an entry because I am one of the "photo stars" this week who is judging the contest. Please check out contest post HERE and enter with a photo comment! Have some fun... go for it!

Thank you for looking, reading, and watching!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography