Light Trails or Motion Blur?

I did some more work on my River Mersey Project this last weekend and decided that I would look at trying to capture some long exposure images. I had in my mind that there are bridges over the river and that traffic flows across these bridges, so that would lend itself to long exposure photography. I did do some scouting of the bridge at the town centre end of the location but that became overly complicated with the motorway bridge being adjacent to the older bridge. I decided the bridge at the Parrswood end of the river would be a better bet. These images are the results of the a shoot I had at the Parrswood bridge over the River Mersey.

This is a landscape orientation image of the road looking from Parrswood down the road towards Cheadle Village. To link this into the project I’ve included a fair bit of the river, although it is a little messy. This image was taken around about sunset was was 6.25pm, which is coming to the end of rush hour traffic, but the long exposure does capture the light trails of both approaching and ongoing traffic.

I decided an alternative approach could be to look for some motion blur, again captured with a long exposure this has a very much shorter shutter speed than the first image. The composition is the same but the effect is very different.

As always when on a location shoot I was always taught to take images of both orientations, landscape and Portrait. I think I prefer this orientation and the 30 second shutter speed here really has captured the light trails. I have left in the edit, because I quit like it, the blue cast that comes with Lee ND filters.

What’s your favourite? Let me know in the comments?