A different take on shooting Christmas lights.

Sometimes we should think outside the box. The town I work in has a big display of lights. Frankly, I’m unimpressed. The display is made up of lights draped over the trees and various wire structures. Maybe if I stopped and got out I’d have a different experience of the lights.

Last year I started experimenting with shooting these lights. I drive by this display when I travel both to and from work. The days are much shorter now, there is plenty of opportunity for this type of shooting.

Here’s how it is done. Find a safe section of road near a Christmas light display. Have someone else drive so you can concentrate on the images. The most important thing to remember is set the camera so the flash will NOT fire. If it fires the picture will be ruined by the reflection of the closed car window and you and your driver or any other drivers around might be temporarily be blinded by the flash. Not a good thing to have happen while driving.

Set your camera to aperture priority and the shutter speed to something below 1/10 of a sec. I choose 1/2 sec. for this exposure. But I have others that are just as interesting but taken with shorter and longer exposure times. Point the camera generally towards the lights and shot away. Don’t bother looking through the view finder just shoot as many exposures as I can. Experiment with panning and holding the camera in different positions.

This section of the road has a 35 mph speed limit and is only a block long so I can get 10 -15 images per pass.

Today’s photographic link points to delicious wallpapers. These are some tasty still life images!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 9:12 am and is filed under Photography, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.