Christmas Lights Photography

As I talked about in my Christmas Lights 2008 post, I did a bit of Christmas lights this year. After I got them all done back on Dec. 18, I took a bunch of pictures of me and Nate's handiwork (would you expect anything else?). I was completely dissatisfied with the pictures, so of course I went right to Google to find out how to take pictures of Christmas lights. Some suggestions were obvious (no flash, use a tripod), others were arcane with f-stops, apertures and manual white balance, but almost all said 2 things: shoot the pictures at dusk and set the white balance to tungsten (aka incandescent bulbs). Shooting at dusk means you get both the lights and the background. The trick is to bracket your shots over time and then pick the best ones. (Much easier now that it's just pixels instead of film). The white balance setting accounts for the fact that all those bulbs (or at least all of mine) have little tungsten filaments in them which glow yellow. Using the tungsten setting gives everything, like the snow, a cool blue glow and makes the sky look awesome. If I remember my physics correctly that makes sense since blue and yellow combined make white.

I headed out at about 4:15 PM on Christmas and after choosing some prime spots, I started shooting at about 4:25 PM. I knew this was too early since I was still able to hold the camera and shoot without a tripod. As it get darker, I kept shooting every few minutes. It was cold enough that I had to wear gloves and the driveway refroze, but luckily neither me nor the camera ended up on the ground. I managed, too, not to get run over when I shot from the street. I even got a compliment on the lights from a driver who missed me. The one element of the lights that I seemed to get a good bracketing on was the inflatable Nativity, which I talk about in my Christmas Lights 2008 post. Below are the shots over time with the time stamps. I think I like the 5:01 PM picture the best, but the one before that is OK, too. You can see that by 5:10 PM, I was just getting the lights.


For those of you who don't celebrate Christmas, I suppose these techniques would work just as well on a Menorah or whatever holiday decorations you put up.