We live in a neighbourhood where people love to decorate their houses with all sorts of lights, reindeer’s, Santa’s sleigh, angels and religious themes. Its such a fun and special times of year for those of you who are just big kids.
And photographically its a fantastic time as well, because those lights look absolutely beautiful; in a photo. This photo would have been taken using a tripod and a very slow shutter speed. When I take photos of Christmas lights I use a tripod (necessary for indoors) and use a shutter between 1/60 and 5 seconds depending on how much light you have coming from the tree itself. I recommend using a slow shutter of no more that this. By using a slow shutter you’ll be slowing the camera down so the lights are sharp and not blurry.
You can use an aperture of around f.8 or f.4/ F.4 is probably better considering you’ll always be shooting at night. These are just my recommendations, I urge you to try it yourself.
You can use a higher ISO if you find you are having trouble with getting more light onto the sensor. Sometimes I’ve used an ISO of 800 to increase the cameras light sensitivity. This can increase noise somewhat but you can use Noise Ninja to tone down any noise if you feel its too much. It will help clean up the noise in your image, leaving you with a sharper image.
For Christmas lights outdoors you can use the same types of settings. Remember also that dusk will be considered as darkness by your camera, so don’t be surprised if you end up shooting as you would at night time.
Happy shooting,
san jose portrait photographers
Benipayo Photography
San Jose | Portrait | Photographer | Children
Contact: Michael at michael@benipayo.com
408-717-3670 — 415-763-7643
Amy Renfrey is the author of two major successful ebooks “Digital Photography Success” and “Advanced Digital Photography”. She is a photographer and also teaches digital photography. Her educational ebooks takes the most complex photography terms and turns them into easy to understand language so that anyone, at any level of photography, can easily move to a semi-professional level of skill in just a very short time. She’s photographed many things from famous musicians (Drummers for Prince and Anastasia) to weddings and portraits of babies. Amy also teaches photography online to her students which can be found at http://www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com
To see the pictures I used as an example and to learn more about digital photography go to http://www.digitalphotographysuccess.com orhttp://www.DigitalPhotography.WordPress.com
by BENIPAYO
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