Make the jump to hyperspace
Use a long exposure to create the illusion that you’re driving at the speed of light.
Here’s a tutorial that’s certain to inject your images with a sense of motion and create the illusion that a car is travelling at the speed of light. You’re going to need some basic photographic kit – a DSLR or mirrorless camera with creative MASP modes, a wide-angle lens to squeeze in as much of the car interior as possible, a tripod to lock off your composition and ensure consistent framing between shots, and finally, a friend who you can persuade to drive you around while you take shots from the back seat.
You need to take several long-exposure images as you drive around town at night. The long shutter speed will blur any neon signs or car headlights that come towards you into long streaks of light as you drive past. When you’ve got a good number of images with trails appearing in different areas of the windscreen, you’ll then be able to load them into Photoshop and layer them up, using Blending modes to get all of the light trails coming through in a single composite image to complete the effect. Ready to make the jump to hyperspace? Here’s how…
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SET UP ON A TRIPOD A tripod is essential for this technique as it will keep the non‑moving parts in the frame relatively sharp. Place two legs of the tripod in the footwells and the last leg on the seat for stability.
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LOCK OFF THE FOCUS Use an ultra-wide-angle or fisheye lens. Using single-point AF, focus on the centre console. Have the interior car lights on while parked to help the camera focus, then switch to manual focus to lock it off.
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DIAL IN THE SETTINGS The faster the car travels, the smoother your traffic trails will appear, so you will often get the best results by driving down a freeway, where you can go faster than in built-up areas. Set the shutter speed to 2secs, select an ISO of around 800 and an aperture to f/4
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START SHOOTING Use a remote shutter release to ensure you don’t nudge the camera as you take the shot. Check the image: if the traffic trails are too short then increase the shutter speed; if it’s too dark or bright, adjust the ISO value. Keep shooting until you have lots of traffic trails in the window.
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LAYER UP YOUR SHOTS Next, you need to merge the images together to increase the number of trails in the window and make it look like you’re making the jump to warp speed. Open Adobe Bridge and select all of the images you want to work on, then go to Tools > Photoshop > Load into Photoshop Layers.
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ALIGN YOUR IMAGES There’s bound to be a little bit of movement between your pictures, but this is easy to fix. With the images loaded together in Photoshop go to Window>Layers and select all the layers. Go to Edit>Auto-Align Layers and hit OK on the box that appears, to make all the pictures line up.
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BLEND THE LAYERS With all the layers selected, change the Blending mode to see light trails from other layers come through into a single image. In the Layers panel click on the drop-down box that says Normal and change it to Lighten. Turn off or reduce the opacity of individual layers until you only see the best trails.
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ADD AN INTERIOR Find a layer with a sharp interior and featuring an image of the driver. Hit Cmd/Ctrl-J to duplicate the layer and drag it to the top of the Layers panel. Change the Blending mode to Normal and click the Add Layer Mask icon. With a soft black Brush tool, paint over the window to reveal the light trails.