Hey folks, i was wondering if anyone could hep me out with some advice about how to shoot night time shots of an urban scene, with cars in it (for the light trails). I operate off a newly purchased Canon 5d (with 24-105 lens) still got a lot to learn, so any advice would e greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Hi,

I am no expert but try some of these;

Keep ISO low, turn noise reduction on, you will probably to play around a bitb but try shooting at 15 sec and around f/8 - check the lCD and adjust accordingly, shoot from a low position and shoot wide. And try to shoot at dusk rather that during the night to prevent a black sky. Oh yeah, and use a tripod and cable release.

Not an exhaustive list but good luck.

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My DCM Gallery

one trick is to use a gobo or a card board or anything with non reflective black surface so you can control your exposure, set to bulb mode then put the gobo infront of your lens if exposure is not necessary then move away the gobo if the scene you want to expose is there. HTH.

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Its hard to beat a good photographer with the right camera.

Hi,

One thing that I've found helpful is to turn the aperture up around f/11 or so.  This creates a really cool star effect on street lights and stuff.

I would also definitely recommend picking up a remote with a trigger lock on it.  I have the XTi (400d) and I use the RS-60E3 remote.  It was pretty cheap, $30 (U.S.).

I typically start at around 30 second exposures, then adjust from there.  For me, every shot requires a little bit of experimentation because of differences in lighting, position of the traffic, etc...

If you're interested, my traffic shots are located in this set on my Flickr account:

http://flickr.com/photos/hypnoeyez99/sets/72157604614661890/