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!

Shoot the moon!

Calculating the exposure for shooting the moon is easy. The moon is in direct sunlight so we can use the “Sunny 16 rule”. If you are not familiar with this rule of thumb, the digital equivalent goes like this: set camera’s time to one over the sensor’s speed and aperture to 16 using manual mode. Check this against what you in camera light meter suggest and you might be very surprised.

Here is an example.

Shutter Speed: 1/100
Aperture: F16
Sensor ISO Equiv: 100

Now it will be hard to hold a camera steady, especially with a telephoto lens on it and use such a slow shutter speed. We can make adjustments to the aperture and the ISO to increase the shutter speed while maintaining the same overall exposure value (EV). Link to article with detail exposure calculation information in it.

Same exposure (EV) as above.

Shutter Speed: 1/2000
Aperture: F8
Sensor ISO Equiv: 400

These two different exposures are the same. You may have wondered why your camera has the various values for the shutter speed, aperture, ISO. The reason is to make this type of calculation easy. One click of the aperture ring doubles or halves the light, one click of the shutter speed dial doubles or halves the light, and one level increase in the ISO doubles or halves the light. If you want more speed, you’ll have to increase the light (Aperture) or increase the light sensitivity (ISO). Each increase is roughly equivalent to 2 clicks on the Aperture and 2 levels on the ISO equals 4 clicks on the shutter speed. Cool ah.

Of course with life there are compromises and here is no different. Higher ISO means more grain (noise in digital terms) and with a wider aperture, the depth of field narrows. So watch out for the extremes of any of these settings.

Have fun with this and by using digital you can check your success in the field and bracket several exposures to ensure you capture what you envision. Just remember that the moon is in full sun even at night!

Today’s photography link is the fantastic “Astronomy Picture of the Day” sponsored by NASA. “The universe is really big and contains stuff. No really! I seen da pictures!”

It is snowing and I’m headed out to go snowshoeing on the mountain. I hope to come up with a good photo tip for you.

Today, I’m going to start a series of posts about tips for improving your digital photography. With each tip, I’ll also point you to one of my favorite websites. It might be related or unrelated, but either way it will be interesting. So, let’s get started with tip #1.

Taking pictures of wildflowers is cliché for the most part. I don’t care, I still take tons of them. The biggest tip for making your wildflower images stand out is it to get down! Get down – really get down with the flowers.

A gopher’s eye view make the subject come alive. This is a prospective that the casual photographer often ignores. There are a couple of advantages the strategy provides.

First, it forces you closer to the subject. This is always a good thing.

Second, you will find your options for backgrounds increases exponentially! The typical, shot from eye level flower photograph, usually will have the ground as the background. Shooting from angle even with or even below the flower allows you to include sky, clouds, other out of focus flowers, and even possibly people in your flower compositions.

Third, when you are crawling around on the ground you just might see a unusual composition like this one. It is the backs of a patch of Arrowleaf Balsamroot.

Well that is it for tip #1. Tomorrow, I’ll let you in on an easy way to calculate the exposure for shooting pictures of the moon on a cloudless night. The first clue is that your camera will think it night time.

Oh, I almost forgot, here is a link to an exceptional forum of photographers brought together by Chris Marquardt who produces the great podcast “Tips from the Top Floor”.

Tips from the Top Floor forums.

The photography contained within my "Cambridge in Colour" collection is from in and around Cambridge University in the England. Cambridge is uniquely scenic, however in low-light it comes alive with a moody atmosphere that brings out its charm and character...