All I can say about this shot is…. WOW, this turned out great, and people are talking!
As you can see from my last blog posting, I went out to shoot a car in various locations throughout Miami. We went out to Watson Island, drove through Coconut Grove, down through Gables by the Sea, and then found a great road with no traffic to take this shot. I knew the theory behind longer exposures and capturing motions, so I put what I thought was right for this shot into play…
First and foremost as to use my newly purchased tripod. I found an “open box” at Best Buy and saved twenty bucks, paying $30 for this one. Since I saved that money, I also bought a monopod as well. After setting up the car facing away from me, I put the tripod in the middle of the road and yelled at the driver – “GO!” – about a half second before hitting the shutter. Why the delay? You have to give time for human reaction! Figure it takes 3/4 of a second for someone to react to something like this if you try it out.
I set the camera to 400 ISO, 18mm, for a 6-second exposure. It was rather dark already and I wanted to make certain I captured as much as I could with the street lighting and what was left of the sunset off to the west (right side of the picture here).
Find a pedestrian overpass somewhere and start playing with your camera until you figure out what setting is just right for what you are dealing with. I worked on some of this during my recent trip to Las Vegas as shown in the night shot below. If you don’t take the time to play with your camera, the only other way to get a shot like this is pure luck! Here are some more samples of night shots with time exposure – click for larger images:
[ad]
