Creative Long Exposure Photography
Written and Photographed by Benjamin Huseman
Artist
Benjamin Huseman is a landscape and wildlife photographer based in Commerce City, Colorado. His work has been featured by local news outlets, Air Force publications, the Thin Line Photo Festival, and is currently on display on the Las Lagunas Gallery “A Light in the Darkness Online Exhibition”.
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Long exposure photographs can introduce motion into a still picture. Often used to show the flow of water, slow shutter speed is a creative tool that many photographers overlook. In this tutorial, I am going to walk you through the steps I used to create this image of cars driving around a Colorado mountain switchback at sunset.
I use the word create because this photo took some work to capture and then to process to get the finished product as I wanted. The hardest part for me in creating this photo was to have patience. The patience required was to not move my camera for several hours while this scene transpired. Let’s discuss this in further detail.
Method + Process
Long exposure photos of cars traveling along a road are nothing new. Many of these photos are taken at night when the lights from the cars are easily captured by the camera. It is much harder to capture those lights around dusk and dawn. The lights are not as bright and the shutter speeds in the brighter ambient light are usually much shorter unless you are using a Neutral Density filter to block additional light. When I set out to capture a long exposure photograph at this location, I did not want to wait until the sky had turned dark to take my photo. It was important to me that I incorporate the colors of the sunset into the photo. But, to do so I needed to overcome that challenge of the car lights not being bright. The solution was to take multiple photos.
I arrived at the location an hour before the scheduled sunset. I used this time to scope out the location I wanted to shoot from, set up my gear, check my composition, and relocate my vehicle so it would not be in the photo. As the sun began to set behind the Continental Divide, the sky along the horizon began to glow with a vibrant orange reminiscent of fire. Using my wireless remote, I began snapping photos as the colors developed and then faded. Next, clouds appeared in the upper sky that began to turn pink and purple as the light of the setting sun diminished. I continued taking photos during this time, all the while, being sure not to move the camera. It is important to note that this photo was shot with a Laowa 15mm f/2 lens. The all manual lens was focused to infinity and I did not have to worry about that focus changing. If you are going to shoot a long exposure photo like this and plan on using multiple exposures, place your camera in manual focus.
After the colors of the sunset faded way and the blue hour began, the head and taillights of the passing cars became more prominent. I was keeping track of how long it was taking cars to complete the path of travel, both up and down the mountain, and made sure that my shutter speed was long enough to capture the entire path in a single exposure. As I saw lights appear on the guardrail in the distance or through the trees, I would trip the shutter and watch the cars drive by. My goal was to get traffic going in both directions and was able to capture a few shots that covered that.
Post-Processing
With my images captured, it was time to put them all together. I initially processed three images in Capture One. The first image was from the setting sun with the horizon looking like it was on fire. The second image was with the pink clouds in the upper sky. The third image was of the cars going up and down the mountain. Processing involved levels adjustments, contrast, shadows, highlights, and making a few dust spots disappear. All three files were exported as TIFFs and loaded into Photoshop where I layered the three images on top of each other and masked the two images with the skies I wanted to keep. The image with the car lights was the base layer. With the layer masks filled with black to hide the sky layers, I used a white brush to reveal the orange light from the setting sun along the horizon on the first sky layer. Then I went to the upper sky layer and revealed the clouds in the upper sky. Once I was happy with the blending of the three layers, I flattened the image and ran the Camera Raw Filter to adjust the overall image. Once satisfied with that, I saved the TIFF and imported back into Capture One where I cropped the photo and made some more minor tweaks.
The overall process to capture this image and blend the multiple exposures was very simple, but it did require some planning to ensure it would be a success. The next time you want to take a long exposure photograph, especially with cars and traffic, try to incorporate a colorful sky into your photo. The results will be more dramatic than a dark night sky. There is a little more work required to do this, and a lot more patience, but the result will be worth it.
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