Dec 14 2007
Tips for shooting Christmas Lights
Photo by Michael DeHaan
Shooting Christmas lights at night - getting the lights to pop will often involve producing distracting grain in the shadows. Restricting the picture gain and crushing the blacks with setup/pedestal/black level will help but another solution, as the strobist explains, is to shoot at dusk:
“The problem with 98% of the photos of Christmas lights is that most people wait until way too late to start shooting. After it gets completely dark, you can either have the lights or the surroundings properly exposed. But not both.
Conversely, if you were to shoot the lights in the middle of the day, they would not show up at all. The trick is find the sweet spot (actually there is a whole range of sweet spots) where the ambient light and the Christmas lights balance”.
Read the full post at strobist.com for a lot more tips and photos. Of course, as with many subjects, it’s a lot more difficult with video than stills. You can’t shoot lower than 1/15th and even that is a stretch, and you need minutes rather than seconds to capture a usable sequence.
