Some of the most fun that you can have with long exposure night photography is experimenting with traffic! I am NOT suggesting you go run around and play IN the traffic, what I am suggesting is that you create some photographs of the traffic moving at night!
When you leave the cameras shutter open for a long period of time, moving objects that have lights on them, like cars, are magically transformed! Instead of seeing a car with two recognizable headlights in the final image, with long exposure photography the headlights turn into white lines that follow the path of the vehicle as it moves through the frame. This allows you to turn a highway full of traffic into nothing but streaks of lights!
The effect happens for ALL lights, regardless of the color, so the red taillights will do the same thing as the vehicle moves away from the camera. Even the green light on an outbound train will turn into a fantastic line of light!
Long Exposure Night Photography – “Providence Highways at Night”
To create the photograph “Providence Highways at Night” I wanted to be able to capture how the two highways and the on and off ramps came together. I found a location that would allow me to use a wide angle lens to fill the frame with the giant sweeping curve of the off ramp. What I love about this composition is that as the cars come at me from the left I see them as streaks of white headlights, but as the traffic moves through the curve in front of me, they transition to the red taillights!
I love night photography, it is so different then the other types of photography that I practice! There is a certain mystery about the night, that really comes through in a photo. In much of my night time city photography I am intent on capturing the lights on the buildings, and the amazing colors of the neon signs. Add in some traffic and set the camera up for a long exposure and you can get some really stunning images full of action!