Light trail landscapes: Rookie seeking advice

[ahsanford]

Found a decent spot to shoot LA rush hour recently. I'm a rank amateur at this (literally my first time trying this) so I tackled it this way:

Tripod, sandbag, all that
Manual mode
5D3 + Naked 24-70 f/4L IS just with a hood on for stray near-the-tripod ambient lighting
Single shot - did not composite for HDR
LiveView 10x for manual focusing
AWB (but I was shooting RAW anyway)
Stopped the lens down to about f/11 for interesting sunstars from the street lights (just as a starting point)
Gunned for about a 30s shutter and adjusted the aperture/shutter slightly to get a 0 EV to -1 EV exposure
Forgot to set mirror lockup -- I presume that was a bad call?
Long exposure noise reduction was OFF -- also a bad call, or does that just affect JPEGs?
Set my histo to not go full back, so ETTL in this case?

Best of the bunch is attached at 50% size. Rough editing in ACR only -- I haven't killed off the helicopters yet or tried to punch up the sky. I was arm-wrestling with the highlights in ACR and it's super touchy -- rein in highlights too much and it's a horrifically cliched 'HDR gone wrong' shot, but do it too little and you just have a glowing white/red river through a sea of near black.

Looking for any technical tips, obvious errors in my approach, etc.

- A

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Just a comment. Liveview locks the mirror up, so you are ok. Getting the right exposure is tough in a case like this one, as you noted, reduce the highlights too much and you must then boost darker areas.

Some software has 10 sliders that give you finer control than the Lightroom highlights slider. You can do better or really mess things up with that much control. ACDSEE Ultimate 8 has the controls.

Here is a very subtle change to the tones using their light equalizer. You can select the number of tone bands to adjust.