Camera College

Photographer and writer Marcus is a former editor of Digital Camera

NEW TUTORIAL SERIES Part 3 of 9

Let there be light trails, said the wise photographer

Using a long exposure to turn dots of light into sinuous streaks can transform everything from still life to the stars at night. Here’s how to get started in the art of light trail photography…

Shooting light trails is a technique anyone can try. You really don’t need a lot of equipment – any camera that gives you manual control over the shutter speed and a decent tripod to keep the camera stationary are pretty much it. The effect is simple to achieve: set a relatively long exposure on the camera, and any light source that moves while the picture is being taken will be recorded as a bright line. The longer the shutter is open, the longer the light trail will be, enabling you to turn slow-moving traffic into ribbons of colour, or distant stars into circular scratches of light in the night sky.

To record light trails, you obviously need to shoot in low light. That doesn’t mean you need to shoot in the middle of night. In fact, if you’re shooting outdoors it’s often better to do so just at the edge of darkness, when the sky still has some colour – whether that’s the cool blue of twilight or the warm tones of a fading sunset. Doing this adds some interest and makes it easier to achieve a more balanced exposure, with detail in both the landscape and the sky. You only need a subtle hint of colour: the level of low-light detail that a digital camera is capable of recording is impressive.

There are various ways in which you can set a longer exposure, depending on how much control you want to have. As its name suggests,

Shutter Priority is the mode of choice when shutter speed is