Movement through car trails

Last night I decided to try capturing some car trails.

I decided on the corner of Nepean Highway and North Road. I assumed (incorrectly) that there would be quite a bit of traffic at 9:30 on a Friday night. To get enough trails I hard to time my exposures with the lights turning green.

I read somewhere that you should choose a reasonable exposure and adjust the aperture from there. I started with 10 seconds and settled on f/16. I was surprised at the white balance because the the sodium lights. Everything was orange!

There wasn't much traffic but I could not make the exposure much longer as I was already at f/16 and ISO200. I grabbed about 20 pictures. I felt pretty isolated on the road. No problems, but it was a bit creepy. The police set up a booze bus a block away and I got breath-alized as I left.

Light Room 3 Beta 2 did a good job of post processing. I ended up manually setting white balance to get white headlights. Fortunately, it's wasy to copy and paste settings, so it did not take long to process all of the pictures.

I was happiest when the images that showed movemvent in different directions. Also, the best images were taken with the tripod fully extended - this put the camera 2 and a bit metres into the air. This gave some seperation to the left and right lights. I was using my 4 dollar sony remote, so I did not have to worry about shaking the camera.