How to photograph your Christmas lights Part 2 | Wilmington NC Family Photography

So on Friday I talked a little about how to photograph your house Christmas lights. You can read that post here. Today I am going to teach you how to photograph your Christmas tree. My absolute favorite Christmas tradition…. decorating the Christmas tree! I just love reminiscing every year about where we got that or this ornament. We have so many sentimental ones. John still has his baby's first Christmas ornament and there's my favorite snowman ornament my parents bought me when I was in middle school. This year we have a few new ones… our new house key. I saw a pin on pinterest and fell in love with the idea! Click here for the pin. And this year we bought Olivia's Baby First Christmas ornament, its pictured below.

So lets talk shop.. how to photograph your tree…

Step 1: Use a tripod. So I talked about this on Friday also. You will get the sharpest photo by using a tripod. You will not be able to hand hold a low shutter speed. Believe me.. Ive tried… Ive also messed up a hell of a lot of photos because of it. :( Flash will not work in this situation. This brings us to step 2...

Step 2: So typically in a low light setting I would recommend an off camera flash. However, in this case you want the lights of the tree to illuminate the photo. So turn that flash off!

Step 3: Close and open your aperture. So, you are probably scratching your head right now and saying "huh". We talked a little about closing your aperture on Friday. You can see in the first photo the lights are little starbursts. I used a closed aperture of f/10 for that photo.  I highly recommend closing your aperture down to do a full length photo. The photo will be nice and sharp and you get those pretty little starburst. When you open your aperture nice and wide you will get that blurry back round and fuzzy lights effect. My aperture was f/1.4 in this photo. You can see the blurry lights right behind Olivia's Christmas ornament in the second photo. I highly recommend opening your aperture up when doing close ups of your tree.

Check in next week. I will be talking about how to photograph your kids better in front of the Christmas tree! Visit www.lesleyveronikaphotography.com for more family photography.