Quick update tonight, because as I write this now it’s 23:24, and I don’t want to miss a day now after successfully completing 335 days!!
Tonight I wanted to go over the Mersey Gateway, and onto the outskirts of Liverpool, where there are two fan like installations that flank the road on either side. I knew the location well, having driven past loads of times, but I didn’t know where I could stop or actually take the shot from.
I had a quick look on google earth, but a spot to capture the image from wasn’t looking good. Ideally I wanted to get close to the “fingers”, but that really wasn’t on the cards. However, their was an entrance on the site of the Landrover Factory; a bridge over the dual carriageway, that looked promising……
Yet again, not strictly somewhere I should have been, but when I arrived I parked the car safely and stood on top of the bridge and thought, yep, this looks a decent spot.
The only issue was from high up the scene was pretty busy, and zooming in with my long lens didn’t help much either. I had to really crank the aperture closed, and the lens didn’t like that at all!! So I was forced to use a 55mm focal length, which was OK but again, I couldn’t cut some of the “clutter” out.
Eventually I landed on settings of:
55mm (to cut out as much distractions as I could, but keep the sweeping line of the road in).
F/22 (to close the aperture down to decrease shutter speed)
30sec shutter (to draw out the light trails)
ISO100 (minimise noise and hold long exposure)
I took a couple of shots and was pretty pleased with them, when a police car whizzed past; then I heard another one coming down the road, so I quickly looked over my shoulder to make sure traffic was coming from behind me too, (I wanted traffic going both ways in the shot) and pressed the shutter button to capture another image.
Sure enough, two police cars came hurtling down the road on the right hand side. For a moment, I thought they might be on my case for taking photos on the Land Rover site! But no, they zoomed off at warp speed straight on past me.
Their lights cast a really interesting trail though, and I was really pleased to have captured it. The lights have intermittent blue streaks in, which is nice, I really like it!
Learnings – I got away with it, this time…..
Onegav 