Here’s a long exposure of a freeway at night. (It’s the, I say the, 405 taken from the Yale overpass.) This picture is practically a cliche, and for various reasons I couldn’t even produce a very good one. But I was eager to try it anyway just because I’m so thrilled to once again have a camera that provides enough manual control to do something like this. Technically, my old Canon had most of the manual controls I needed—though not all—but in practice they were all but impossible to use.
One feature the Lumix has is built-in neutral density filters. I had never heard of such a thing before, but it’s surprisingly handy. This picture, for example, was taken with the lowest ISO setting and a 64x neutral density setting. It was the only way to get the long shutter time that I needed.
