After the interesting results of the daytime driving time lapse I was anxious to try the same thing at night. For night driving, the choice of shutter speed has more consequences for the look of your video. A long exposure (slow shutter speed) will create light trails and give that laser-y look to the passing cars and street lights while a short exposure will give results similar to the daytime driving time lapse. Because the street lights and headlights are really the focus of this video, I chose to use a long exposure with a frame rate of 1 every 2.5 seconds.

The mistake that I made was in choosing a framerate that was slower than my shutter speed. During the time between exposures, my car obviously continued to move. This results in gaps in the light streams passing by my car in the video. The better choice would have been to set my shutter speed to 2.5 seconds to ensure the appropriate frame rate and then set my camera to continuous shooting and set the cable release to hold. Depending on how quickly your camera can shoot continuous photos at the current resolution you can all but eliminate the gaps between frames that are noticeable in this video.

Also, if you're wondering what happened during that white out portion at the middle of the video; I thought it would be cool to drive through the mall parking deck on the way home while shooting this video. Obviously the shutter speed I was using was way too long for the bright environment in the parking garage. If you are taking a video like this and move from dark to light or light to dark PULL OVER and change your shutter speed, don't try to do it while you're driving! It may seem like you're interrupting the flow of the video but when you put the video together it won't be that noticeable that you pulled over while shooting and if it is, you can always cut out the offending frames.