I love planning. I don’t like random email pitches from PR or product companies.

Today the two worlds collide. That’s because Expedia pitched me something I ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT AND WILL USE! It doesn’t happen often.

It’s their Kids In The City program and you might be able to guess what it’s about. Kids. Cities. Doing stuff (with their parents).

The site offers up individually picked attractions and fun-things-to-do in a dozen major cities across the USA. The individuals doing the picking are parenting and traveling experts by the likes of Debbie Dubrow, Jen Miner, Mara Gorman and Kara Williams. These are people I know, personally, in real life, and trust their recommendations. Heck, before this program, I was even going to be asking Jen what might be fun to do with Sabrina in LA as we will be taking two trips there this summer. Now I don’t have to because she tells us in a video!

Expedia will be highlighting 12 cities over 12 days (and it started yesterday, so you need to catch up!) on the site to help with your summer planning.

If you have kids, give it a look-see. Yes, eventually it has links to be able to book things on Expedia, but there is no hard sell and the picks are genuine points of interest moms in those cities think you will find fun. They have first hand knowledge of many of the attractions and have tested them with their own kids. Humanely, I hope.

It’s a resource I have already found useful and will be checking out Portland as well for two trips this summer with Sabrina.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Spinning Trails

Location: Point Reyes National Seashore, California, USA, North America

Description: The condensation trails of a 747 bound for Asia intertwine as the jumbo jet climbs away from the Bay area.

Shot with a Canon 7D and Sigma 50-500mm lens with settings of ISO 800, 500mm, f/6.3, 1/500th of a second

Photograph Creative Commons Copyright Non Commercial Peter West Carey

Are you interested in joining a photo tour in Nepal, Bhutan or India in 2012? Email me for more information or click here.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

I am shooting time-lapse on almost every trip I take at this point. It’s an enjoyable, different way to represent a location. I will be stringing these images and video through my presentations with the People, Places & Patterns Project and more will be presented on this blog as well.  Enjoy!

And as a bonus, a video I shot last week at from the roof of Velas Vallarta with a GoPro Hero 2 thanks to BorrowLenses.com.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Enjoying The Sunset

Location: Vista Del Mar, San Francisco, California, USA, North America

Shot with a Canon 7D and Canon 28-300mm L lens with settings of ISO 100, 85mm, f/6.3, 1/60th of a second.

Photograph Creative Commons Copyright Peter West Carey

Are you interested in joining a photo tour in Nepal, Bhutan or India in 2012? Email me for more information or click here.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: San Francisco Panorama Exploration

Location: Bernal Hill, San Francisco, California, USA, North America

Description: Hidden behind the city from the popular skyline shot across the Golden Gate, Bernal Heights is not a place most tourists choose to visit. There are no sea lions, promenades or sightseeing boats found on the hill. Just a gorgeous view of the city and bay captured at sunset.

Shot with a Canon 7D and Canon 28-300mm L lens with settings of ISO 100, 100mm, f/9, 1/60th of a second. 132 images were shot in three rows in portrait oreintation and stitched with Kolor’s AutoPano Giga. Total size is approximately 488 megapixels, my largest to date.

Photographs Copyright Peter West Carey

Are you interested in joining a photo tour in Nepal, Bhutan or India in 2012? Email me for more information or click here.

Note: You likely won’t see the image above if you are reading this via email or some RSS viewers. Click here to be taken to a full view.

If you want to see more Panoramas like this one, click here.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Photographers At Daybreak

Location: Point Reyes National Seashore, California, USA, North America

Description: A different view on the same scene as a few days ago (check it out here), but this time with the human element prominent. Along with a rather large lens, a Sigma 50-500mm, courtesy of BorrowLenses.com in the foreground. The two gentleman hired me for a day out in nature for a chance to see light in a different way and to practice photography. A great way to spend a morning (even though my heart nearly stopped as I barely missed hitting a deer on the way to meet them in the pre-dawn hours).

Shot with a Canon 7D and Canon 10-22mm EF lens with settings of ISO 100, 10mm, f/8 and 1/500th of a second.

Photographs Creative Commons Copyright Peter West Carey

Are you interested in joining a photo tour in Nepal, India or Bhutan in 2012 or 2013? Email me for more information or click here.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Sunset Over The San Andreas Fault

Location: Point Reyes National Seashore, California, USA, North America

Description: Fog is held at bay for just a while the sun makes an appearance in a field of gold.

Shot with a Canon 7D and Canon 10-22mm EF lens with settings of ISO 100, 10mm, f/10 and 1/400th of a second using a Singh-Ray Reverse Graduated Neutral Density Filter.

Photographs Creative Commons Copyright Peter West Carey

Are you interested in joining a photo tour in Nepal, India or Bhutan in 2012 or 2013? Email me for more information or click here.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Pacific Sunset

Location: San Francisco, California, USA, North America

Photograph Creative Commons Copyright Peter West Carey

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Bernal Hill At Sunset

Location: San Francisco, California, USA, North America

Description: After arriving in to San Francisco last night, my wonderful friend and hostess Liz saw me drooling over the beautiful light all around and took me to a great city overlook south of Downtown. I will have city panoramas posted here soon and in the mean time, this is the view looking to the ocean.

Shot with a Canon 7D and Canon 10-22mm EF lens with settings of ISO 100, 20mm, f/4.5, 1/100th of a second

Photograph Creative Commons Copyright Peter West Carey

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.

Light Trails take a bit of imagination to conceptualize and shoot. While not vital, it helps to be able to plot out how you want your image to appear to understand the camera settings for this type of photography.

Here’s the deal; light comes in to your camera and hits your sensor. As mentioned previously, your sensor’s pixels and little scales measuring the amount of light ‘weighing’ on them (‘striking’ them is another way to think of it and is more accurate). The more light that hits the sensor, the higher the scale reads. Most pixels have a scale from 0-255. 0 is black. 255 is all filled up with that particular pixel’s color (red, green, blue…if you need a diagram, check out the post on ISO).

All fine and well. What happens to create a light trail is light from a source moves across the scene in front of the camera and is emitting light (or reflecting it, but lets stick with an actual light sources here, like a lightbulb, or the glowing eyes of the Yeti which actually emit light, look it up). As it moves from left to right, let’s say, it essentially ‘paints’ the pixels in its path with something brighter than what was behind it. Often these shots are taken at night, so the background is really dark, maybe a 20 on that 0-255 scale. Now this bright light comes along and pushes the pixel ‘sensors’ up to 240 or even maxes them out to 255.

The pixels can’t go back down the scale and thus they show the bright 240 reading even though the light source has moved on to the pixels next to them. Confused?  I kinda am, so let’s look at a pretty picture.

In this Fourth Of July shot I had the kids stand completely still. I then took a lit sparkler and traced it around them. It’s one of the few times I could get my daughter to remain still, so I I tried it many times to get the above image. Because the sparkler (emitting light all over the place) was brighter than background, and the shutter was open for 30 seconds, I was able to trace and have that movement recorded on the sensor.

Another pretty picture.

Now over to Nepal with its mountains and chances to see stars. The exact same thing is happening here, believe it or not. Well, kinda. On a simple scale I am holding the camera still on planet Earth and it is rotating. The stars are (perceptively, but not actually) holding still. So when the camera moves and the light source holds still, the light appears to move. Which is cool! In this case, the shutter was left open for 445 seconds.

There are two basic ways to go about recording light trails, be they Earth bound or in the heavens.

Method 1 – Long Exposure

This is the method in the first image. I left the shutter open for 30 seconds in Shutter Priority mode. If you have a cable release or remote control for your camera, you can hold the shutter open even longer (or just hold down the shutter release when in Bulb mode, which might require switching to Manual mode). The long exposure method has its limits and challenges.

First of all, your subject needs to not move ideally, otherwise it will appear blurred while the light trail is painted. I’m talking here about the subject, not the light that is doing the trailing. Having kids stand still for 30 seconds is about the limits of this challenge according to the laws of physics. Even a relatively slow shutter speed can create light trails. Take a look at this .8 second long exposure of the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica pier in California.

.8 seconds might not be long on the back of a bull, but it is long enough to give just enough movement to the lights on the wheel. In this case, it was pretty easy to get the pier to not move (barring earthquakes).

Get a tripod. Or, if no tripod is handy (as in the picture above) use anything that you can that won’t move. In this case I set my backpack down on the sand, positioned the camera on the back of it and used a timed shot to help ensure I wasn’t moving the camera, burring the pier.

Another example. This shot is 20 seconds long and is taken in downtown Langley, Washington.

Method 2 – Stacking Multiple Images

The other main method is to stack multiple, shorter shutter length images into one final image. This takes a special program or Photoshop skills. I downloaded a simple program that costs $17 call Image Stacker. And it does just that. The method used to create light trails is called “Brightest”. Opps! Let me take a step back.

So step one would be to take the images. You would setup your camera on a sturdy surface or tripod. Something non-moving (which begs the question of why I attempted this demo in California). Using either your finger to keep pressing the shutter lease, or a handy product called an intervalometer, you take a series of images, one after the other, as close together as you can. This can lead to hundreds of images, or maybe just a dozen if you like.

In the computer, you would then throw these images (in JPEG or TIFF format) at Image Stacker, choosing the ‘Brightest’ option. The program then looks at the same pixel in each image and only uses the brightest one. It does this for how many ever millions of pixels you have. If you are shooting at a mainly black sky, for instance, it will see black in all of those pixels except for when a start moves across. Then it will just show that bight spot.

In this way you get trails, which may have spaces in them depending on the time between shots and how fast the objects are moving. By way of example, let me show you a test I did this week.

I shot 150 frames of the view from Santa Monica towards LAX airport to the south. Each frame was .8 seconds long and a shot was taken each second. The frames were then assembled the images using Lightroom and this cool plugin. The video it spit out looked like…

If I take those same images and stack them, I receive the image below:

Kinda cool. If I had taken one second exposures, the spaces in between lines would be gone.

I hope those two methods of creating light trails start you thinking about what you can create. Don’t look to the stars for all your inspiration, grab any type of light and see what you can create!

Next Up: How I Edited It

31+ Days To Better Photography is a series written by professional photographer Peter West Carey on The Carey Adventures.Com. The series is designed to unravel the mysteries of photography so you can take better pictures. Subscribe here to receive all the updates and bonus material. Your comments are always welcome.

©2012 The Carey Adventures. All Rights Reserved.