Capturing Light Tracks

Aug. 10, 2025839 Views 5 min read

Actually, capturing light trails is very similar to photographing star trails. So check out our page dedicated to this as well.

Method of photographing light trails

Set up your tripod with camera. Choose a nice, wide field of view. Choose your aperture high enough (e.g. f/22) and ISO low enough (e.g. ISO 200) to get an exposure time of 15 to 30 seconds to get a well-lit image. Now, when you see a car, bus, etc. approaching, click - just before it will appear in the image field - on the shutter button. This will be open for 15 to 30 seconds and you will get long traces of light coming from the head and/or tail lights.

Tips for capturing light trails

Tip 1: make sure you print just before the vehicle comes into view. You will then obtain a continuous light trace. If you do not do this, the light track will start too late. It is usually stronger photographically if the light trails run through the entire image field. Do not print too early, or else the picture will stop before the vehicle has completely left the image field, which is not really the intention.

Tip 2: If you want your final result to look dramatic(er), take several shots one after another without changing the field of view (i.e., tripod remains, same lens is used). Each of the shots will then normally contain traces of light. You can then use software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop CS) to layer these images nicely. This will result in one composite image where your overall image will be nicely highlighted and contain the collection of light traces from all the partial images.

These 3 basic photos were digitally superimposed to obtain the final result at the top of this page. Settings: 24 mm wide angle, f/22, ISO 200, 30 seconds exposure time.

Tip 3: when taking long-exposed shots of, say, 30 seconds, with many cameras you will see speckles appear in the darkest parts of the shot. This is due to technical imperfections of the camera. If you want to avoid these, you will be able to set a setting in the better cameras that allows you to suppress this type of speckle: each shot will then be followed by a so-called dark frame of the same duration. This is an image taken with the shutter curtain closed. Such a technical shot is then used to remove all speckles from your just taken image with light trace. You do lose some time with this, because each shot of say 30 seconds then takes 2x as long, i.e. one minute. It does result in correct images without speckles. And you save a lot of time afterwards because you no longer have to remove the speckles manually (which is actually almost impossible to do). So activate this "noise reduction" in your camera.

Tip 4: Many times your photo will have several fixed, point-like light sources in the picture. Think of streetlights, for example. Know then that as you take a higher f-number (this means that your aperture becomes smaller, so less light passes through), you will get a more pronounced stereo effect around these point-shaped light sources. If you like this effect, then choose for example f/22, if you do not want this effect try a lower f-number like for example f/5.6. If at these lower values, too much light enters your camera, making it difficult to get the desired 15 to 30 seconds of exposure time, it is possible that you will have to use a gray filter. This then dims the entire scene somewhat. Very dim light traces are then less likely to be picked up and captured.

Tip 5: Know that you can use this technique not only at night, but also during the day. Try it yourself. Here is an example of a photo taken from a bridge over the A19 freeway. Here the choice was made to let the camera take several shots one after the other completely independently. This did not result in continuous stripes, but slightly interrupted light stripes. The stripes are interrupted because after taking one picture the camera needs a very short time to write away the result. During that time, the vehicle has already moved a bit and so in the next shot you can see that it has moved a bit in the image. In the end result, it looks like a whole row of long white trucks were driving on the highway. So in reality there was only one 😉