Christmas light shooting strategies

[Dbl]

Starting to see a few Christmas light posts so I thought I would throw out a few tips to make the holiday lights stand out from the crowd.

1. Read Steve's tips on cold weather care of your camera at the top of the page. You will need a tripod or some type of good support. A remote shutter release will be a plus as well, though you can get by with using your cameras self-timer, this works for point and shoots as well as DSLR cameras.

2. Most people shoot Christmas lights when its dark, what you really want is to catch the lights when the ambient light is close to the Christmas lights themselves. Another words you should be out shooting just before sunset. You will be taking a a lot of shots and you will find that there is about a 10 minute window of really good light that balances out your Christmas lights. Your colors will pop off the screen.

The problem with shooting them when it is dark is that the camera will overexpose the Christmas lights and underexpose the dark scene around it. If you expose for the Christmas lights you will have points of light in a sea of dark. Get out and catch the lights when you have some color in your sky.

3. Christmas lights are tungsten balanced light. If you are shooting in AWB you normally will end up with white lights yellow, red lights orange, etc. Set your White Balance for tungsten or indoor lighting. Your bulb colors will be close to what they actually are. Your sky, since you are shooting with some ambient light still around, will take on a nice blue color as well. This one tip will make your shots stand out from most others! Many point and shoots have the ability to set WB so you can get beautiful results with them as well.

This is not the greatest, shot a bit early. You can see the blue tinge caused by the adjusting the WB, but the sky should have been a bit darker to bring out the blue lights in the tree to the left.

4. Use some interesting angles, a lot of sky, experiment if you have a zoom by zooming in or out while tripping the shutter. Use reflections from sheets of ice and bulbs to show objects or yourself. Shots that use the environment around them make the most memorable photos.

Good luck and if anyone has more tips, add to this. When you get some shots share them here so we can all enjoy the lights this time of year. These two photos are not my best but they illustrate some of the ideas from this post.

[Steve Foss]

Excellent advice Dan, and nice examples of your work.

My favorite sky color for years and years has been that deep indigo you get after certain sunsets but before full dark. Using this as a backdrop for Christmas lighting can be dramatic.

In urban parks and downtown areas, the ambient light cast from streetlights and the many lit buildings and signs can make it more possible to achieve nice Christmas light photography after full dark, but most of us don't have those settings available without some travel, and we're limited by what we can do in our neighborhoods and smaller cities and towns.

And so I totally agree it's best to get the vast majority of Christmas lights well before full dark.

When the contrast between the brights of the lights and shadows of the dark surroundings are too high for the sensor to handle, it's also a good time to bracket your exposures and blend them in photoshop as per a tutorial posted earlier on this board. Shooting from a tripod with remote shutter release or self timer allows you to capture those bracketed exposures or to adjust exposure compensation between frames without altering composition.

Have fun, everyone, and remember to enjoy the holidays even as you are out capturing that holiday cheer on your cameras. Don't forget those dry chemical handwarmers for your pockets. Shooting Christmas lights can be C-C-Cold work.

Here's one from a small lake near Ely easily seen from Hwy 169. Every year the homeowners of a place along the lakeshore run a long extension cord out to the lake and put up a tree with lights. My goal is to get this from a different angle with a lot of sky in the shot when the sky is that aforementioned indigo, but I'll have to wait until we actually get a sunny day. You can see this was shot after sundown, when all the shaded snow has that purple/blue cast to it.