You could be forgiven to think that I only take architectural photographs – so, just to buck the trend on this site, here is something different.

I get up very early for the commute into London, usually catching the 06:06 train from Charlbury, Oxfordshire.  Right now, it is pitch dark in the mornings (sunrise is around 07:20 currently), but this was a few weeks ago just after sunrise when there was some mist in the Evenlode Valley.

While driving to the station, I decided to catch the next train (06:28) rather than the usual one and I would spend some time taking some photos – I was actually more interested in the hay rolls in the field, but in the end decided on something a little more dynamic in the light trails from the cars – I tried a few shots with cars going away from me, but the red tail lights didn’t show up so well – I got better photos with the car coming towards me – here is the result.

For this the camera had to be mounted on my tripod  – the light levels were low (lower than this photo suggests), and the shutter needs to be open for a reasonable length of time to capture the trails – 4s turned out to be the best in this situation.

This photograph was edit in Lightroom 4 (while I had LR5, I hadn’t migrated over to it until later) – setting the camera profile, applying a gradient on the sky, tweaking the white balance and then some selective dodging and burning.  I finished up with noise reduction, sharpening and a slight vignette.

Technical details:

Nikon D80, 4s@f/16; 18mm; ISO100; Post processing in Lightroom 4