By Dave Johnson
December 19, 2009

Focusing on Holiday Portraits
Since the holidays are about getting together with friends and family, you’ll want to take some portraits along the way. The two biggest problems people tend to have with holiday photos is focus and lighting. Let’s start with focus.

If you’re shooting just one or two people at a time, try to use the narrowest depth of field possible. This brings the subject into sharp focus while causing the background to melt away in a gentle blur. The easiest way to do that is by using your camera’s aperture priority mode and dialing in a small f-stop number.

For group shots, you’ll want to set the aperture in exactly the opposite direction: to ensure that everyone in the photo is in focus, set the biggest f-stop number that your camera allows; this will help you achieve enough depth of field to ensure that everyone from front to back will be in focus. The background won’t blur as it does when you shoot with a small f-number, but you’ll have better luck keeping everyone in focus.


Shedding Light on Your Christmas Morning Photos
If you position your subject in front of a window, you’ll want to overexpose the scene a bit, because your camera’s sensor will be confused by the daylight streaming in the back of the shot. Left to its own devices, your camera will tend to underexpose the faces of your subjects. Use your camera’s exposure compensation control to start with a value of +1, and then experiment to see what works best.

Sharing Your Photos After the Holidays
Now that you’ve assembled a collection of holiday photos, what can you do with them?

If your PC runs Windows 7, you can create your own holiday-photo-themed desktop that randomly displays selections from a set of photos as a desktop background. The results will this look great on your PC, and you can share the theme with friends and family who also have Windows 7–maybe as a personalized holiday gift.

To get started, right-click the desktop and choose Personalize; then click Desktop Background, browse to your photos, and select your best shots of friends, family, and holiday lights. (To make this step easier, you could collect all of the holiday photos into a single folder.) Click Save Changes. Now, in the My Themes section, right-click your new Unsaved Theme and choose Save theme for sharing. You can give the resulting file to friends and family, and they in turn can install it as a theme on their own Windows 7 PCs, with a simple double-click.

Another option: Turn your favorite photos into calendars, coffee mugs, mouse pads, jigsaw puzzles, or other gifts. If you already share your photos online or occasionally make prints from an online printing site, you’ll find that most of those sites offer all sorts of gift options as well. The most popular sites include Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and SmugMug. Also, check out “Parlay Your Photos Into Holiday Cards and Calendars” for more photo gift ideas.

By Dave Johnson
December 19, 2009

The holidays are a time for colorful gifts, candy canes, and holiday pictures. And with a little attention to exposure settings and shooting techniques, you can capture great holiday photos you’ll want to share.


Choose the Right Camera Settings
When the house is filling with guests and the kids want to open their gifts, you don’t want to worry about your camera settings. Here’s how to optimize your camera in advance for the kinds of shots you plan to take.

For all-around indoor holiday photography, prepare your camera to shoot fast action in low light. Kids are like cats: They might appear calm and quiet, but you can’t predict what they’ll do next, especially under the influence of presents and candy. If you’ll be shooting during daylight hours, turn off the camera’s flash and increase the ISO to ensure that the camera can take good natural-light photos. Then either set the camera to its action scene mode or switch to aperture priority and use a small f-number, which will give you the fastest possible shutter speed.

In the evening, you’ll probably need to turn the flash back on, but you might want to leave the ISO setting high–especially if you’ll be shooting in a large room–so you can fully illuminate the scene.


Capture the Magic With a Series of Photos
Often, a single photo can’t adequately capture the moment. If your camera has an interval timer mode (check the camera’s menu or user guide), you can use it to create your own time-lapse photos. Set up the camera in a corner of the room with a good view of the action, and configure it to snap one picture every minute or so as you decorate the tree or open presents. You can turn the resulting photos into a time-lapse movie, or you can publish the most interesting shots as a series of images on your Web site or photo-sharing site.

Another alternative is to use the burst mode or continuous-shooting setting on your camera to take a series of rapid-fire shots while the assembled multitude is opening gifts. You’re much likelier to get a memorable photo this way, and you can discard the images that you don’t like.

Whether you choose to shoot photos at intervals or in burst mode, you’ll want to avoid using the flash, in order to save battery life and to let the camera recharge faster, with less lag between shots.

By Dave Johnson
November 3, 2009

Halloween is behind us, and you know what that means: The holiday season has descended. This time of year is a photographer’s dream come true: between now and January, it seems that every few weeks we have a new reason to put lighted decorations outside the house. In the past I’ve given you some general advice for taking holiday photos, but this year I thought it would be fun to take an in-depth look at the best ways to take photos of those holiday lights. You can use these tips over and over again this fall, whether you’re shooting Halloween, Chanukah, Christmas, or New Year’s events.

Preparing Your Camera
When you head out to shoot some holiday lights, be sure to make sure your camera is ready. You can get good results with almost any sort of camera–you don’t need a digital SLR–but I do recommend using a tripod. Nighttime exposures are always somewhat slow, and it’s just not possible to freeze the action when the shutter is open for a whole second.

If you don’t have a tripod, you can consider propping the camera on top of a bean bag (or a bean bag-like gadget, such as The Pod. Bean bags are handy because they conform to the shape of the camera as well as to the shape of whatever you’re placing the camera on.

When to Shoot
This is the most important part of the stew–and the ingredient that most people omit when they try taking holiday lighting photos.

The typical shots of holiday lights–the ones you see all the time–are taken at night, long after the sun is gone and the background is in total darkness. In these photos, the lights are bursting at the seams, and the background is abject darkness. There’s little context, and no drama. These photos aren’t bad, but they lack a certain vitality.

The remedy? Shoot shortly after sunset, when there’s still some light in the sky.

Set up in front of the lighting display when there’s still plenty of light in the sky, at least half an hour before the sky goes totally dark. You should be able to see the display lights, but they should still be fighting the natural light in the sky.

Setting Your Exposure
One last thing to consider before you start shooting: the exposure settings. If your camera lets you adjust the white balance, you should set it to “tungsten” or “incandescent.” These settings will give you a richer, bluer sky as well as better lights.

You can leave the camera on its automatic setting, but if you can dial in manual and adjust aperture and shutter separately, you can try starting with f/8 and a half second. To change the overall exposure, open the shutter longer (for a brighter scene) or shorter (for less exposure). To make the strings of holiday lights brighter and more dramatic, open the aperture (a smaller number–like f/4).

If the lights are already too bright and overexposed, you can throttle the aperture down to f/11.

The bottom line? Experiment.

Frame the Scene
Getting to the scene early enough is more than half the battle. Start taking some photos and check the results you’re getting. As the sky gets darker, you’ll start to hit a sweet spot in which the background sets a dramatic tone for your photos, but the lighting takes over the foreground and becomes the “protagonist” in your scene.

Be sure to take a lot of photos and try a number of different angles, but you’re guaranteed to get some great photos if you “go wide” and include a lot of sky.

This approach means you won’t be able to shoot a lot of different locations in a single night, but the holidays last for months–you’ve got plenty of time.