How to Shoot Christmas Lights

By Sonny on December 10, 2016 in Articles, Blog, How To

Last year I went out and shot Christmas Lights. Always a fun subject to shoot. Colorful, bright and sparkly.

Check out the video I created to show you what gear I carried that night.

I thought I’d share some tips and techniques with you on how to capture Christmas Light images. Here are some of the things that I did to craft my Christmas light photos.

I used 2 tripods. I used a “taller” tripod to get shots that were about head or chest height. I used a super low tripod to get shots from ground level. For this I used the Platypod Pro, but something like the Pedco Ultrapod II would work just fine. I used a Manfrotto quick release system to make it easy and quickly attach my camera to the tripods. You can also use THIS ADAPTER on any tripod.

I used 2 lenses: a 15mm – 36mm equivalent and a 27mm – 82mm equivalent. I love shooting with the wide angle, but isolating certain things with the medium range telephoto is good too.

Here were my typical camera settings: ISO 200, f8.0, shutter speed on auto for the scene (it might set itself somewhere around 8 – 10 seconds depending on how bright the lights in your image are). You can also make exposure compensation adjustments to taste. I use ISO 200 to get it as noise free as I can and f8.0 for scenes where there is a lot of depth with the lights to keep them in focus.

If you want to see “starburst” (a cool effect) set your f-stop to a high (small) aperture like f16, f18, f22, etc. Just realize you’ll increase the duration of the shutter speed when you do so.

For the family shot, I used a flash and a wireless trigger (so I didn’t have to use a timer and RUN into the shot).

Set up your tripod and pick a good spot where cars drive by to get some cool light streaks.

Get down low, use a wide angle lens and put something interesting in the foreground.

Open up the aperture, find a good subject and intentionally throw the background out of focus.

Try this: Set the camera on a tripod. Have your shutter speed at 1 or 2 seconds or so. Smoothly zoom in or out. You’ll get a nice “burst” looking image.

Here are a few more examples of the above techniques: