About the Image(s)

How I did it

Preshooting - I watched the fall leaves along this stretch of road about 5 miles from my house. When I thought conditions were nearly at peak for fall foliage I shot my first test. I timed cars going through the scene and decided to use a 20 second exposure. Two nights later I went out with my tripod, Canon R5 and my 24-105 EF lens. I took a 7-shot exposure series of the trees from 20 minutes before sunset until about 5 minutes after sunset. Then I began shooting 20 second exposures of cars driving through the scene.

From this I learned three things. First the optimum time to catch the colors of the foliage here was about 5 minutes before sunset. Second, some cars drive slowly and I could not count on one fixed exposure time. Third, the best time to shoot the taillights of the cars is about 20-30 minutes after sunset.

The night of the final shoot I used my tripod, R5 and my 100-500 lens set at 105mm. The exposure of the 7-shot series was done at ISO 400, f/22 (where f/32 is the smallest aperture) and a time range of 1/15 to 1.0 second. The car lights were triggered with a remote timer when the car was about to enter the field of view and stopped just before the car went over the far hill.

In post I combined the 7 shots into an HDR in LR Classic and did the basic adjustments. In PS I duplicated the image, flipped in horizontally and stacked the two images to eliminate the neutral space of the sky at the top. I then simply underlayed the car light image (below the HDR) and used the "Screen" mode to pull the lights through onto the road scene.