You may have seen those cool long-exposure photos taken along mountain roads, mostly in the Alps, I think, in the “blue hour” just during and after sunset when there’s enough light to get some of the landscape details on a long exposure but not so much that you lose the contrast between the headlights and taillights of cars as they wind down the road in long streams of light and the dark mountainous landscape around them.
I’ve always wanted to imitate those shots. You can do some really neat things with long-exposure, especially if you have some ND filters that make everything darker than it actually is. If you have enough filters, you can take a shot of Times Square at 7pm on a Saturday where all the people simply disappear and it’s a kind of eerie, post-apocalyptic image. A bit less time, or blending different lengths of exposure, and you can get an urban landscape full of motion trails, half-seen ghosts, and a few unmoving and tangible people. Same with traffic.
The hard part though is finding a place to shoot from where there’s a likeable composition and that’s safely accessible. Safely means that you can walk to and from that site in the dark (you want the camera position itself to be safe). If it’s elevated (which it probably ought to be), that’s easier said than done. A lot of times that I see an image of a fantastic sunset from high up in the mountains at what I take to be a remote location, I always think, “Man, I hope the trail back is safe or that they have a campsite nearby”. The more accessible it is, the more the image will be a kind of cliche (like those shots in the Alps, of which there are a great many).
This shot, in St. George Utah, is not very far from the little hotel I was staying at, and it’s not all that great a location. I was also probably a hour or two too late to get great reflective light off the cliff in the distance, which was really striking earlier in the evening. I think it would have been a better shot if I was a bit lower down, but that would have meant carefully climbing down a very steep hill that really would not have had a stable position for my tripod. That’s another requirement of this kind of shot, a good tripod, which means if there’s any kind of scrambling to be done in the dark, you may only have one free hand.
I got much luckier one time when camping in the Adirondacks. We huddled miserably in our tent during a violent thunderstorm at sunset, but the moment it was over I scrambled out with the camera to the nearby road, where I’d be planning to do some long-exposure photos of the traffic heading downhill through the White Mountains. Now I figured I might get that plus the departing storm.
That’s what I got—in this case, a big-rig truck whose tail-lights were at two levels as a result. I was almost more happy with the clouds—long exposures of fast-moving clouds produce some really fantastic shapes and gradations in some cases.