5 Tips For Great Holiday Shots

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Christmas is almost here, and with it comes some excellent opportunities for taking pictures. If you are like me and spend a fair amount of time setting up a tree, lights, and decorations, take some time to capture that before Christmas morning. Here are some tips to get the most out of your decoration pictures:

1. Turn Off All The Room Lights: This will allow the whole room to be lit only by your decorations. If the lighting is still dark, you can always add lights back in one by one (starting with a table lamp or two, vs. ceiling lights).

2. Use Long Shutter Speeds: To get the really great shots of your lights, use long exposures. Start by turning your camera mode to Shutter Priority (usually marked by Tv). Set your ISO to 100. Then try setting the shutter to 4 or 5 seconds or longer. This will allow the image to ’soak in’ your tree/decoration lights. The pictures in this series were exposed for 15 seconds at f/6.3, with an ISO of 100.

3. Use a Tripod: This will be critical for those long exposure shots, because you can’t hand-hold a camera during a several-second exposure. If you don’t have a tripod, try placing the camera on a table or several books. If you have a remote release (a device which attaches to the camera and allows you to take the picture without touching the actual camera), use that. If your camera supports a ‘mirror lockup’ feature, you can also try that. All of these techniques will help ensure the sharpest image possible.

4. Experiment With White Balance: If your camera allows you to change the white balance, try different settings like Tungsten, Shade, Cloudy, etc. These will help enhance the warm colors in your image, or give your image a cool blue tint which works great for certain situations.

5. Make Adjustments: If your images are coming out too dark, lower the shutter speed even more (over 10 seconds). If the images are too bright, raise the shutter speed. Some cameras will have blinking dots on the display when parts of the image are ‘blown out’ (i.e. too bright). Try to keep those areas to a minimum.

We haven’t actually set up a tree yet, so you’ll have to settle for these Christmas Village pieces. I hope you take advantage of the season to take some great shots! To close this out, here’s an image of our Christmas card for 2008. You can catch a larger version on the blog.

Eric Doggett is a Austin, Texas photographer. He just relaunched his new site which includes tons of images and several behind-the-scenes videos. He also runs BoxOfficeBaby.com, a site where you can order custom birth/party announcement cards and posters – including some unique tech birth announcements. You can reach him at doggett (-at-) doggettstudios.com.