Hello and welcome back to tographyfeelz. In this post i'll explain how I created some log exposure image of one of Bangkoks most famous landmarks. Let's dive in!
The weather hadn't been cooperating at all. I had planned a few sunset missions only to be either rained off or left staring at a completely blank, grey wall of cloud. Not so inspiring, so I decided to change my approach.
I haven't done much long exposure photography, but figured the city of Bangkok lends its self pretty well to this genre. The hectic nature of people and traffic constantly buzzing around seemed like a match made in heaven. Spoiler alert, I think it was.
So my cousin, Schogn and I headed out just before it got dark and had a look around the awesome monument in Bangkok. Figuring out what compositions worked best and where we would be able to get the most effective light trails that added to the composition rather than taking away from it.
We finally settled on this composition as our first attempt. A bridge that rises over one of four roads that merge at the huge round about, faces almost directly east. This gives a good view of the scale and drama of the scene in my opinion. So, out came the tripod, I set up my Sony A7C and Tamron 28-75 F2.8 and took some shots. Complete darkness hadn't quite fallen, as you can see in the sky so my shutter speed needed some assistance to be reduced. I placed my Haida variable nd system in front of the lens, dialled in 7 stops of light reduction which gave a shutter speed of 20 seconds. Boom! Now we are talking! So I snapped two 20 second exposures and blended them in PS to add some more drama to the light trails. Here is the result below!
x2 20 second exposures, ISO 100, F16, 28mm
Once we had spent a little while shooting this composition. We decided to try a few other compositions. The first of which was this next image. Moving to the farthest point left on the same bridge and pointing the camera more towards the south gave a completely different composition. Again using the light trails as a compositional element, leading into the frame, the Monument is standing tall on the left of the image with not much competing with it. Then to balance we have the BTS train streaking over on the right along with the Baiyoke Tower far right to give some balance to the image. Again I used my Haida filters set to 6 stops this time to give 20 seconds exposure and here is the result!
20 second, ISO 100, F16, 28mm
Feeling happy and confident with another nice frame in the bag, we moved on to one final composition. On the way to the last spot I snapped a few hand held shots of the monument. Trying out the low light performance of this awesome little A7c, I was super impressed and very happy with the results, here they are.
The last composition was found at road level. A small island in the road for traffic lights and a crossing point gave me the space to set the tripod up again framing the monument on the right of the shot. This gave space for the light trails to lead into the shot from bottom right to top left, a classic compositional technique. Again not satisfied with one exposure, I took 3 shots and combined the best elements of each to give this result.
x3 15second exposures, ISO 100, F11, 28mm
Im not sure which of these long exposures is my favourite but I really enjoyed this photo mission! Super happy with the results and really impressed with how my equipment performed!
Safe to say i'll be heading out for more cityscape photography very soon! If you enjoyed this blog, then be sure to leave a comment and tell me why. What you'd like to see more of and any specific Bangkok locations you'd like me to shoot!
Thanks for reading , Arran!!!