Long Exposure Light Trails

Experimentation with Long Exposure - Light Trails 

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The photograph above shows my experimental piece using long exposure light trails. In order to capture light trails, I used LED battery operated lights, and waved them in front of my Canon 1200D, set to a long exposure time of 25 seconds, a low ISO of 400, and a focal length 18mm. A flash was not needed, otherwise this could over-expose the image. The image was taken at around 9pm, I believe this was a good time to photograph, because not only have I got an interesting and complex patterns within the light trails, I have also captured a beautiful orange sunset. I believe the use of two colored lights (Green and Purple) works well, especially the neon green, which are eyes are instantly drawn to. Because this photograph is my favorite, I decided to edit it in Photoshop, by increasing the saturation, hence why both the sky and light trails are vibrant. This was inspired by Andrew Whyte's 'The smile that lights the night' (shown below) as I have used the technique of long exposure to capture light trails. 

Title - 'The Smile that lights the night'
Media - Long Exposure Photograph
Date - 2013
Photographer - Andrew Whyte

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I believe the light trails in photograph 2 have worked well, this time I decided to use just one set of blue LED lights, I did this because orange and blue are complementary colours, so the blue lights work well with the orange sky. Although the light trails are good, unfortunately I made the mistake of moving the lights behind me at the start, this can be seen on the right 

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