How to photograph Christmas lights?

[Sherlock77]

At least my way to do it... Photographing just the lights is boring to me, I like to create a scene around it, went out on Christmas Eve to take in some lights, there is a whole plaza at this light display... And as much as possible I am tracking how people move around the image, it's not entirely random... Tips and tricks...

[I did post these photos in another thread here too]

 

[Mr Alligator]

The bokeh effect is an interesting way to capture them, see image 8 on this website

How to Create Bokeh - Bokeh Photography Tips | Nikon | Nikon

Learn Nikon tips on how to achieve blur bokeh effects in your photos and see our beautiful examples of bokeh.

www.nikonusa.com

 

[Outdated]

Another method is to use the HDR function on your camera. It takes 3 consecutive shots at different exposure levels that you can later blend to get a good exposure over the whole scene. Awkward if there's a lot of movement in the scene though.

[Edit] Playing with HDR really hammered home to me just how amazing our eyesight is, but it raised another question, is it our eyes that see better or is our brain doing all the post processing?

 

[Slime_Punk]

Mine came out pretty bad, but whatevs. This little park here is also where I got married, fun fact

 

[SusanLR]

For a simple no-tech little camera, take a deep breath and hold it...

 

[Judge]

I still recall the night our photography instructor in an adult education class told us we'd be making a "computer". Yeah- right...lol. We students thought he was nuts. The joke was on us when we built our own light computers for night shots. Here's how it was done. He basically handed out cardboard templates where all we had to do was to cut them out and then "assemble" them kind of like a cardboard slide rule. I was so impressed with how simple this thing worked that I reinforced the cardboard with plastic to make it last.

Here's what I'm talking about. To the left is the "body" of the computer. First to the right is the part that slides into the body. Third from the left is what it looks like when functional. Fourth is the back of the body, with a numbered list of basic, but different kind of lighting scenes you may encounter. In essence, you determine the scene number that best describes the conditions for a particular shot. You then consider whatever ISO setting you want to try, and slide the part that fits into the body until you line up the ASA/ISO setting with the scene number. In this instance you'd line up scene 2 (Christmas Trees) with ISO 400 or a higher setting.

Once that is done, simply refer to the right where the appropriate shutter speed and F-Stop correlates to each other. Given the images shown below, I wanted a broad depth-of-field, so I chose F16. Note the shutter speed that is aligned with F16. It's 1/8 of a second. Though at times you would probably want to bracket different settings to experiment with getting the optimal shot. It may not be perfect, but for the most part it works rather well IMO.

This was one of the 35mm film pictures I shot using this little simple tool with my Canon A-1:

San Francisco Bay Bridge/ Embarcadero Christmas Lighting, December 1987

 

[Sherlock77]

@Judge That looks like a basic version of a pinhole camera...

@SusanLR Nice photo, and everyone else too...

I've always enjoyed a broader scene, although they are trickier to capture nicely