These temporary displays offer many unique variations using readily available lights. With a large range of lights on offer, the creative expression comes from how they are used. This depends on the design and layout of the house and garden.
Gardens without large plants offer an unobstructed view over a wide area, while trees offer a number of additional possibilities, including the obvious Christmas tree.
The considerable physical and creative work involved in creating a home Christmas display deserves recognition and preservation. The variety provides a rich, if short lived, opportunity for photographic essays.
The photographer adds their own creative input by choosing viewing angles and selecting parts of the scene using the angle of view of the digital camera lens.
Another important variable is the time of day. Complete darkness may not present the best conditions for the display. Partial darkness with silhouettes of buildings, trees and other features provides a context for the lights. This can be tricky, because the scene changes rapidly as the natural light fades, and there may be only a short moment to capture the ideal image.
Equipment
•A tripod is essential, as exposures around the one-second mark are common in this type of photography. The tripod should be compact and easy to set up for use in the dark in a public places.
•The digital camera should have a setting for manual adjustment of the shutter speed for timed exposures.
•Lens choice is not critical, as most general-purpose zoom lenses are suitable. They need enough of a wide-angle setting to get a whole house from the sidewalk and then enough zoom to isolate elements of the display.
•A small pocket torch provides useful light for changing tripod or camera settings.
Correct Exposure
There is no such thing as the correct exposure. With so many competing light sources, exposure is a compromise: capturing the bright lights without shortchanging the more subtle effects. Human eyes and brain automatically compensate for these differences as we scan a scene.
The large dark areas in the scene may fool the camera’s metering system, so experimentation is the key to determining exposure. Start with a shutter speed of half a second and use the LCD display to gauge the results. Look for the sharpness of the brightest lights in the scene. Adjusting the shutter speed is the main method of achieving a pleasing exposure for the images.
ISO or sensitivity should be set to its lowest value for optimum noise performance.
Aperture choice is not critical for exposure. Choose an aperture with depth of field as a major consideration.
With a very high range of contrast from pitch black to bright white, it is very hard to fit all the light levels into the 256 values for light level allocated in most cameras.
One advanced solution is to take a series of images optimizing the exposure for the different areas then combine them later in Photoshop or the Gimp. Even if this technique may appear beyond your present capabilities, if the originals are stored safely then the images can be combined at any time.
White Balance
Modern digital cameras generally are very good at compensating for the inherent color of different artificial light sources. However, in this case white balance is difficult with many different colored lights the digital camera struggles to find a reference point.
This may not be a major concern, as the point of the digital image is to capture this variety of artificial colored lights. Reality may not be the creative option.
If a RAW file format is available in the digital camera, then various software packages offer options for measuring and setting the color temperature. This allows photographers to concentrate on a particular part of the image and adjust the image’s white balance for a particular area. The photographer decides on the most important area of the image and its correct color.
Big D Photo
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