Creating a lighttrail shot

Lighttrail shots are usually shot at night when there's a lot of contrast between the bright lights and dark surroundings. These shots are usually done at night. You could also use an ND filter and produce similar shots during day.

In essence it's simply a long exposure shot that happens to capture a moving light. They can be moving cars, but you could also lightpaint with a flash light.

Sometimes there's a tradeof

If you set the exposure too low you'll end up getting shots where the lighttrails are too faint. If you set your exposure too high you'll get shots where the lighttrails are all overexposed. We want neither of those two.
Always take some test shots first!

You could make a very long exposure and let the lighttrails build upon themselves, but It might look weird.

My shots

Here are my shots from the other night. Most are 5 second exposures. The last one is 13 seconds to get a brighter sky.

Because I couldn't catch a lot of traffic in 5 seconds I took multiple shots to combine them in Photoshop

First you'll want to make adjustments to your photos in Lightroom.
Remove chromatic abberation and fix some dust spots if you have any. Copy the setting from one file to all the others and you are done.
Next select all photos and select "edit in Photoshop".

In Photoshop you'll need to align all layers first.
Next set all layers but the last one to "brighten". This will only let the brightest parts of your photo show up if compared to the last image.
Lastly you'll want to use some luminosity masks to paint in the Sky from the brighter exposure. I also panted in some cartrails from that exposure.

Crop your image and you are done.

Depending on how you want your image you can of course edit it further. (I changed the colors a bit and added sharpness)

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Used Equpiment:

Camera: Pentax K-30 + tripod
Lenses: Cosinon 50mm

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Interested in photography?

Check out my About Photography series:

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#15 Dealing with Dust

#14 3 Tips for Landscape Photography

#13 Center & Symmetry

#12 Leading Lines

#11 Choosing the Right Camera

#10 Macro Extension Tubes

#9 Rule of Thirds

#8 Optical Distortion

#7 Focal Length

#6 Different Filters

#5 Polarizing Filters

#4 Exposure Triangle

#3 ISO settings

#2 Shutter Speed

#1 Aperture

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Some of my previous posts!

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#12 Evening Shots

GreekTrail Logo Contest

DIY Spades Filter

Dead Man's Bones - Name in Stone

MemeChallenge #24

#11 Evening Steemit Shots

Quantum Teleportation 1200km

You can find me on:

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Feel free to use my images :) Questions about photography are welcome! Upvote, comment, resteem and follow if you like! Have a great day!