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Trails of light through Napier

This is a style of photography I haven’t tried for a few years. It took half an hour of standing around and waiting for traffic to come from north to south along Marine Parade. This roundabout is in the heart of Napier. You can see The Dome behind. The road to the right is Browning Street. Most of the cars were coming up Browning Street or coming towards the camera along Marine Parade. Light trail photography can be quite unpredictable. Especially when the lights are coming from moving vehicles that you don’t know where they’re heading. With headlights being so much brighter than the red of trail lights, too many cars coming towards the camera don’t make for a pleasing photograph. In the end this was a motorhome heading around the roundabout and south along the parade. It was a 5 second long single exposure.

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The Bund and Zhongshan Road at night

The Waibaidu Bridge in the foreground connects traffic along the Zhongshan Road. Which winds around the curves of the Huangpu River. This was the view from my hotel room, the Broadway Mansions Hotel Shanghai. I forget which floor this was from but I would stay there again. It is in an ideal location for exploring The Bund and tourist areas of central Shanghai. I’m not sure the names of the buildings along the river. The dark area across the bridge is Huangpu Park which is lovely to explore.

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Red London Eye at night

The London Eye is one of the icons of the city and one of my favourite things to photograph in the centre of London. As the wheel moves almost constantly at half a mile an hour. One rotation takes around 30 minutes. This means that The London Eye rarely stops moving. A longer exposure time of more than a few seconds at night results in this blur of the wheel. After taking a shorter length exposure. It started moving and I set the camera to a 30 second exposer to get this photograph. The red light of the wheel appears as one continuous ring, as the lights on the 32 capsules almost blur together. The lights of the County Hall building to the right, are lit up in blue light which contrasts well next to the red. One of the issues I had with such a long exposure time is there are boats moving up and down the river. They leave long light trails which can distract your eye from the focal point of the image. The two barges in the foreground move from the motion of the river, even though they’re tied up to the bank. I tried to capture this whilst the boats were as still as possible.

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Red telephone box at night

I stumbled upon this red telephone box walking back from Westminster along Albert Embankment. This was near the central London Fire Brigade building on the banks of the River Thames. With the street lights behind I pulled out the camera for a quick snap. Not only did I not plan to capture the big red bus going past, I didn’t even see it until I reviewed my photographs. It was a lucky accident to capture two icons of London in one frame, especially at night. This was a 1/13th of a second long exposure, handheld.