Behind the Scenes: S-Curves

When I lived Utah, anytime, I was going up into the mountains to adventure, or snowboard I would drive past this spot in Big Cottonwood Canyon. I had scoped this angle when checking out a climbing location and knew I wanted to make a photograph here. It was a matter of waiting for the ideal conditions.

I ended up choosing an evening when I was already up the canyon, and the forecast was pointing towards some colour in the sunset. Once set up, the composition was straight forward. The S-Curve from the road led perfectly into the frame. Only having a limited time to make this image due to the sky I hoped I would get enough cars driving by to create the picture, but being that it is a busy road I wasn’t too concerned.

I chose an aperture of f/8.0 so everything would be sharp and set the camera to bulb mode on a tripod to avoid any unnecessary camera shake from the long exposure with an ISO of 100 to get the least amount of noise in the shadows. I would open the shutter when a car drove into the frame, and release it once it drove out. It initially took a little bit of guesswork to judge how long the exposure would need to be to time a car driving entirely through the frame and still have enough light to expose the rest of the image. The cars weren’t consistent either, they all drove different speeds leaving the image way underexposed a couple of times. Other times I would have a car going down, and nothing coming up and the road would look empty. A few other times cars pulled in and out of the parking lot at the bottom, creating light trails that weren’t consistent.

I finally got a moment when a line of cars was going down, and a single car was coming up, creating a steady trail. However, it was later in the evening, so the mountains started to get a bit dark, and I didn’t want to keep the exposure going longer and potentially risk another car driving into the frame creating unwanted light trails.

Once in Lightroom, I brought up the exposure and shadows to make sure the mountains weren’t too dark. Also, I bumped up the saturation to make the colours of the sky pop. All and all I try to be very subtle with my editing in post-production. I don’t want to create a piece that has been over-processed and looks unreal. Often my goal is to edit in a way to represent the scene how I saw it, with the obvious exception here of the light trails.

Gear:
Canon 5d Mark II
Canon 17-40 f/4L (19mm)
Shutter Release Cable
Tripod

Settings:
46 sec at f/8.0, ISO 100

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Behind the Shot series where I tell the story behind my action, adventure and landscape photography and dissect the techniques and gear that was used to make it.