Three Tips for Photographing Holiday Lights

We put up holiday lights to see how pretty they look when it gets dark.

You want to capture those lights on your camera, but getting them to look right in your pictures can be more of a challenge than you bargained for.

Professional photographers have lot of experience and cameras with all sorts of settings that most of us wouldn’t know what to do with. 

Here are three tips for amateur photographers.  

1. Turn off your flash. If you use a flash, your automatic settings will respond to the light of your flash, and your holiday lights won’t show up.
2. Use a tripod. You just turned off your flash. That means that your camera is going to try to make up for having less light but leaving the lens open longer. This means any tiny movement you make will likely blur your picture. If you have no tripod, improvise. Set your camera on a flat surface to take the picture, or lean your body and arms against a tree or car to keep yourself steady as possible.
3. Shoot at dusk, not full dark. Most of the time, you can do better with that little light left in the sky and still see the lights.

Use these tips to take a picture of your holiday lights. Post the picture to Malvern Patch’s Deck the Halls contest page and you could win $100,000 for your school district.

Want to get more technical than that? Here are some other resources for taking holiday photographs.

• New York Institute of Photography
• MacWorld
• Strobist Blog
• eHow
• Turner Photographics
• Canon
• Snapfish
• Olympus