![]() If your holiday lights are LED or full spectrum and you set your white balance to Incandescent, then the lights in the photo will look more blue than your eye perceived them. Want your lights to look warmer? Incandescent lights shot with your white balance set to Daylight will make the lights look more orange. ![]() Adjust your white balance for warmer lights This helps capture the full light cycle (if you’re in Shutter priority mode, you won’t have to worry about adjusting your other exposure settings accordingly).Ī bonus to the Incandescent setting is that it gives your ambient sky the gorgeous blue tones of the ever-popular blue hour. Increase shutter speed for blinking lights Snow, water, or even wet concrete will take your photos up a notch by softly reflecting your lights. Fill your frameįill it with everything you’re trying to capture, including some negative space or reflective surfaces. Note, though, that it does leave your photo vulnerable to blurry moving subjects (kids, flying reindeer, trees in the wind). If you need more light, increase the exposure time (slow shutter speed)ĭo this instead of increasing the ISO - this prevents the grain that will be introduced by the higher ISO, plus long exposure captures the full glory of the light display. The lights that you’re photographing are likely incandescent bulbs, so the Incandescent setting will faithfully render the color of your lights. Your camera might call it Tungsten, but they’re the same thing. Remember: lower numbers let it more light, and higher numbers let in less. This is a good starting point if you’re following our previous suggestions. Low ISO means higher quality, because if you use a super high ISO, your image will be grainy. Any time you’re on a tripod, go all out with the lowest ISO possible. It may not be enough to notice, but you’ll get technical degradation nonetheless. If your photos are too dark, increase it, but know that any increase to the ISO will degrade image quality. Unless you have an incredibly powerful flash or are very close to your subject, the flash isn’t likely to contribute much to the exposure anyway. You’re trying to capture the color of the lights, and even if they aren’t multi-colored, your flash could interfere with the lights’ color profile. It’s the only way to guarantee a crisp shot for your long exposures. So unless you’ve got superhuman steadiness, bust out the tripod. Without it, you’ll probably end up sacrificing a lot of image quality because of slow shutter speeds. This means that you have plenty of opportunity to capture a variety of scenes, but not a lot of actual time. Between sunset and nightfall, each minute will bring slightly different lighting conditions. We’re serious about that few minutes part - if you’ve tried to photograph a sunset, you know how quickly the light changes. That way, the sky’s ambient light will come in to complement the lights, which can remain your focus. ![]() You’ll pick up the beautiful ambient colors of the sky and surroundings and get much more photographic texture than the flat blackness. Photograph around twilight or duskįor a few minutes, the atmospheric light will perfectly complement the continuous artificial lights. If it exposes for the surroundings, the lights will be completely washed out, almost colorless. If the camera exposes for the lights, they’ll look like they’re floating in nothingness. Your camera can either properly expose for the lights or for the lights’ surroundings. When it’s pitch black outside, exposure becomes tricky. It sorta makes sense to wait until nightfall - you don’t want the sun hogging all the light, and after all, won’t lights look the best in the dark? There are the buildings and trees (probably too far away) with their teeny lights against a pitch black background. Most Christmas light photos look basically the same.
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