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Bus to St Paul's

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^{Please click on the image to view full screen!}

Category	Cityscape Photography
Settings	2 sec | f/16 | ISO 200 | 12mm
Camera	Olympus OMD EM1 Mark 2
Lens	Olympus 12 - 24 F/2.8 Pro
Location	London UK

In this post I'd like to share a tip on how to shoot better light trails.

Issues you may encounter are unwanted artefacts, highlight blowouts and in this case, unwanted pedestrians and other vehicles. To begin with, you must shoot on a tripod to ensure all your exposures will line up later when it comes to editing.

Have a look at the image below, which is the original exposure. As you can see, the pedestrians moving on the right and the headlights from the car in the distance are not ideal and the shot in greatly improved by removing them.

So when it comes time to shooting this kind of scene, think about the elements you would like to include and exclude and take some extra exposures with this in mind.

The image below shows another exposure with far less pedestrians.

As you can see, there is still an issue of unwanted car headlights in the distance, so this has been omitted in the next shot.



So altogether the final image has a total of 3 exposures and they were loaded into Photoshop as layers and then aligned by selecting all the layers and aligning them with Edit > Auto-Align-Layers. This is to ensure perfect alignment in case the tripod moved slightly between shots.

The next step is to use masks to blend the parts of the image in that you need (and don't need). It beyond the scope of this post to go into the details on how to do this, if you are already proficient with Photoshop, you should be able to work this out.

Otherwise I heartily recommend learning about layers and masks in Photoshop, they will open up a whole world of editing techniques to you that will seriously up you game. There are many tutorials around the internet and some work searching with Google and/or YouTube will show you the way.

If you decide to take this on, good luck and many thanks for reading.

Website: https://www.richeewilson.com
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