POTW: Roundabout Light Trails

It was 9:00 PM on Sunday (my weekly POTW cutoff is midnight on Sundays) and I still had no picture for this week. So I packed up the car and just started driving around in hopes of finding something. First plan was to get a picture overlooking the Cleveland Zoo. I went to a nearby bridge and the rain forest exhibit wasn't all that impressive looking so that was out. Then thought I'd do a night shot overlooking the industrial area in Cleveland. Well I drove to where I thought would be a good spot and turns out it just gets a picture of the shopping center and it wasn't a good one. Fortunately this spot was near a roundabout that I could get some good light trails from. Thus that's how the picture above came to be.

I'm not completely happy with it. Ideally the street lights would be dimmer so the light trails would show up more. Tried various settings and couldn't find a combination that worked exactly how I wanted. The rest of it was pure luck. I had the shutter speed set so I would get consistent brightness. Didn't want to go variable and set it to bulb mode but now I realized that's how I took the fireworks picture and it may have allowed me to vary the shutter so I got a good light trail and just enough time to let the scene burn in. Also spent quite a while deciding between a white balance of what it looked like to me or a proper white balance based off the street sign. I ended up going with what it looked like to my eye instead of the proper white balance one.