Fun with Holiday Lights

Under normal circumstances, I spend a decent amount of time online, researching better ways to take and edit photos. Reading up on what I consider to be best practices. I check forums, read blogs, try out tutorials... you name it. I am always looking for ways to improve what I do.

During the last couple of months, I've been pretty limited in my time online. I was fortunate to be booked through the fall months, and with three young kids nipping at my heels during my time "off," there just weren't many spare minutes to be had.

One thing I did come across was a cute set of photos done by another photographer and replicated by a few others on a discussion board. Given that I rarely see something that I don't want to try, I hopped online and found myself the cheap set of multi-colored lights I needed to create my own version.

And so, I give you my take on the "lights as backdrop" shots:





I left everything set up to try it out on my daughter as well, but the darn girl is just sooooooo grubby by the time she gets home from school... I never really felt up to the work it would entail to get her photo-ready.

And on the subject of playing with lights, I'd been wanting to capture a different sort of tree image this year, so I tried a few different things. This one was by far my favorite.



Now I'm by no means an expert on this type of photography, but if you have a dSLR and you're interested in trying it yourself, just throw your camera on AV, open up your aperture (put the AV number as low as it will go; mine was at 2.8), and -- this is the important part -- put your lens on manual focus (not auto focus). Then play with that focus ring until what you see is what you're going for. Voila!