Reflections...: Holiday Lights

Another field which is to experiment and have fun in photography is taking photos of Holiday Lights decorated within the city neighborhoods. Taking pictures of holiday lights till few years back was difficult because of the film cameras which were not that sensitive to lights and darkness. It was difficult to capture an image in low-light and at night. Now, things have become easy due to increasing technology in DSLR’s which solved the problems of low light photography. Today, many DSLRs can be set to ISO speeds of 1600, 3200 and even higher settings with little noise.

Many photographers today are depending on auto-exposure with their point-and-shoots, Cell phone cameras and SLR’s which are giving good results even in low light. It is very important to note that holiday lights usually look good when shot without added light. Truly, the good point, when it comes to take good pictures of lights is to turn off the flash. With good care, proper settings and proper angles and by avoiding the camera shake while taking pictures (use tripod or place camera on stable platform) you can get good Holiday Lights photographs.

I am not giving the technical details for each picture since most of the rules followed to snap these shots are changing depending upon location, decoration and time. I tried to capture lights decorated on homes and trees in some neighborhoods during holidays. Thanks to those wonderful people who decorated their homes excellently and making the neighborhoods colorful and beautiful and giving me a chance to work on this topic.

Few pictures I took recently on Holiday Lights are shown here:

Click on each picture to see in large format