I’ve seen a lot of photos of the famous curvy road on highway 42 near Gills Rock in Door County. I looked online for awhile and couldn’t find one that was at night with light trails so I thought I stumbled upon an original idea for once. A Facebook commenter of my photo put it nicely with: “Fantastic original image of an overdone location. Well done!”

Location

The curvy road is highway 42 near Gills Rock in Door County, WI. The road eventually leads to the ferry to Washington Island. If you stop there you’ll probably encounter other people stopping and getting out of their car to take a picture. The place is quite famous now with travel magazines featuring it. Originally I just wanted to get a photo of it with fall colors, but then thought it might be even cooler to see light trails on it at night.

I first visited the place during the day to take my standard fall color pictures of it. There’s a nice road to pull off on called Fawn Lane nearby which I would recommend people park their car here rather than on highway 42 in the gravel. This makes it safer for motorists to drive on the road when your car isn’t halfway on the road still. You don’t necessarily have to stand on the road to get a good picture, but during the day it might be worth it. For this particular picture I stood off the road as it was night and someone might hit me with their car. Also be warned, I got a deer tick on me while standing in the tall grass in the ditch.

Composition

When I took this photo it was past ferry traffic time so I didn’t think I’d get any cars driving by. Originally I was going to have my wife drive the road for me to get the picture, but just after I got out of the car, 3-4 cars drove by in a matter of 10 minutes. The first car drove towards me and that photo didn’t turn out very good. I didn’t have my focus properly set at this point. Next a car approached from the back. After this I used my flashlight to set the focus on my camera by shinning it on some trees in the distance. I then lowered my ISO to 100, set my aperture at F2.8 and shutter speed at 30 seconds since that was about how long it took a car to drive the visible part of the road. As the cars got closer I triggered my 5 second timer on my camera and let it do its thing. It was interesting as each picture looked a bit different from the last. After 3 cars passed from the back, no more came and I gave up for the night.

Post Processing

Software Used

Lightroom

Compared to most of my photos, I didn’t spend a great deal of time post processing this one, maybe 1 hour total. The car’s headlights nicely illuminated the trees around the road. For the most part I gave more emphases on the center part of the image and tried to bring out the fall colors more. I also cropped it more so that the curvy part of the light trails would be bigger. I knew this was the most important part of the image and I wanted to fill the frame more with it.

Overall I’m quite proud of the image and feel like it’s one of my more original ones I’ve taken.

 

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