Night Light Trails

This photo was taken a while back in 2018. I decided to do a night walk and walked out of the house with the camera on a gorillapod. I had the camera strapped around my neck with the gorilla pod hanging from the camera. Not sure how dumb i looked, im sure very dumb. But the quality of photos I get beats the dumb looks. And at the end of the day, dunno anybody who can remember all or any of the dumb looking people ever seen walking around, so who cares.

I remember doing a few of these night walks. Instead of going to the beach at sunset I’d walk in the oposite direction to the city center. (Exactly the same distance as to the beach, but walking north instead of south). These are always tricky because of camera settings. The advantage is the fact that on a mirrorless camera, what you see is what you get. Its prety easy to expose, lock the apperture and wiggle with the shutterspeed, if its too much to your liking finetune with ISO. These are random steps that work for me in this kind of situations. Every situation is different, and I learned my lesson ruining a plethora of photos just cause im to stubborn to just leave the camera on auto. The ruining of photos was a little devastating, but the learning was real, and I realized and knew that the sucking would be temporary and eventually was gonna brake thru and take stunning photos all the time.

So with the camera somewhat tuned i’d just walk around looking for places to set the gorilla pod. Mailboxes, garbage bins, fire hydrants. Never even consider what was i photographing, I wanted a place to put the camera and take a photo with moving lights. In this particular photo, the camera was resting on top of a newspaper dispenser machine right by the sidewalk. I loved that frame cause it had the lookout up and center. Stayed there a few traffic light changes. As I was there with the camera in position just hitting the shutter and waiting for the countdown to finish so i can take another photo, some pedestrian lady said something to me. I’ve always been worried about getting confronted by people, so I decided to flat out ignore what she said. Another good thing is that I usually do the walks with my headphones on, which gives me permission to ignore, if they really want my attention they can signal with their hands. This lady just kept walking with her companion.

Got a few photos out of that specific location, I picked this one cause has a few things i liked. First the lookout up and center. Its also the blue color like the light on the other buildings, pops but not too much to be distracting. There’s also the glare on the street lights frame the cars, and the car turning continuing the red light across the frame but without getting to the edge. Can tell it was an Audi Q3 or Q5 by the shape of the stop lights.

That night got some very very good photos, this wasn’t the best of the walk, it was the best of the ones that didn’t make the cut for other projects.

Tech Spechs: Fujifilm XT-2: 16mm – f 16 – 5s – ISO 200