Long Exposure

The May challenge for the Viewfinders camera club is a B&W shot using an exposure time of greater than 1 second.  One of my ideas is shown below.  I remember from the olden days of film cameras that you could take multiple exposures of a scene with moving objects and when you finished the multiple shots, the moving objects would not show in the picture because of their short appearance time compared to the whole shot. I thought I'd try something similar by using a long exposure.  My target was the I-10 interchange at Loop 410.  It is probably the busiest intersection in the city, with traffic on all connectors at most all times of day.

There is a hotel, the Marriott Northwest, near the interchange.   My hope was that there would be a publically-accessible window on an upper floor where I could take a shot of the highways.  The hotel has 11 floors.  I took my tripod and camera up the elevator to the 10th floor and there was a suitable window right at the elevator.  I had three 8x neutral density filters to give a nine-stop attenuation.  It was about 3 PM on a Friday so there was a lot of light and also a lot of traffic.  The photo here was a 60-second exposure at ISO 100.  The only complaint I have is the reflections from the inside of the window.  They are a little distracting, but I think I proved the point of removing the moving cars from the scene.  They occupy probably less than 1% of the time at any one point on the road, so they do not show in the overall shot.