Photographing the Holiday Lights

The holiday season is upon us!! Whew, how did that happen?  Wasn’t it just summer yesterday? Well, it seems like it, anyway.

With holiday lights being installed on homes and businesses all over town and Blossoms of Light (BOL) at Denver Botanic Gardens on York Street and Trail of Lights (TOL) at Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield opening soon, it’s time to get out your camera and tripod and get ready to take some wonderful holiday photographs. If you’re really organized, you can visit BOL or TOL early in the season, make a nice family portrait in front of the beautiful lighting displays and have your cards printed and delivered in plenty of time to beat the holiday rush! Wouldn’t that be awesome?!!

Photographing BOL and TOL presents some unique challenges. The biggest challenge is the low light you’ll be photographing in. By the time these events open to the public each evening, it is fully dark outside and often the only illumination in the scene is the lights from the display. In most cases you will need a tripod or some way to steady your camera as your shutter speeds are likely to be very long. With long shutter speeds you will get blurry images due to camera movement during the exposure. The tripod really is key to creating successful holiday lighting images.

When you choose to visit will also affect your photos. I recommend coming more than once during different weather conditions to experiment. For example, clear nights will give you very dark skies, overcast nights will pick up the lights of the city and add to your backgrounds. In the best possible scenario, it helps to photograph lighting displays at dusk when there is still some residual light in the sky. This gives you a deep blue sky which will set off the shapes of the trees and lights.

Even without that dusky light you can take some wonderful photographs. Look for decorated areas where the lighting arrangement fills the trees or shrubs and defines the shape well. Also look for areas where the landscape around the trees is lighter so that it reflects some of the light, adding more depth to your image. Whenever you can reflect the lighting in water it will add interest to the images. If you can visit during or after a snowfall, the snow will reflect the colors of the lights and add drama to your images. Even rainfall can make for dramatic images of lighting displays, although it takes a little of the holiday feeling out of the scene.

Photographing your friends and family amongst the lighting displays can make for some wonderful images. On many point-and-shoot cameras there is a flash setting that will allow you to expose for the decorative lighting and pop a little flash in to illuminate your human subject in the foreground. The symbol for this is usually a crescent moon and star symbol in your flash settings menu. If you are a more advanced photographer, I recommend you experiment with a combination of manual exposures on your camera and pop in a bit of light from your flash to light your people. This can make for a very dramatic image full of holiday spirit!

Cheers!!

If all this seems foreign yet sounds like fun, please consider signing up for one of the few remaining spots left in Photographing Blossoms of Light on Thursday, December 15 at 3 pm.  Scott is the official photographer for Denver Botanic Gardens and teaches numerous classes throughout the year.  Keep an eye out for some of his upcoming 2012 classes – Digital Workflow for Photographers on January 19, Basic Point and Shoot Photography on February 15 and Creative Basics of Photography on April 18.

Guest Blogger: Scott Dressel-Martin

Scott has a highly refined talent for creating dramatic interior and exterior images of built and planted spaces. From the epic scale of a convention center or urban hotel to the intricate details of a delicate flower, Scott is adept at extracting spectacularly creative images. With a keen eye for light and design and a sincere and easygoing manner, he has a reputation for creating genuine photographs of people not accustomed to being photographed. Scott has a Masters degree in photography from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, N.Y. He began his career in newspaper photojournalism and now works with an exclusive clientele, including Denver Botanic Gardens and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He has traveled and been published internationally.  Scott is the owner of dressel-martin mediaworks.