Taking Christmas Seriously

[Colin Southern]

At my youngest daughter's insistance we took a late-at-night drive to find Christmas Lights. Although we live a 1/2 hour drive from the city, it turns out that the best of them all was just a few blocks away.

As luck would have it, I didn't have my tripod with me - so shot this 1/25th @ ISO 1600 hand held ... and this wasn't even 1/2 of it!

[Shadowman]

Colin,

Very nice shot, I've been working on a still life with similar lighting and and found your settings helpful.

John

[Colin Southern]

Colin,

Very nice shot, I've been working on a still life with similar lighting and and found your settings helpful.

John

Thanks John,

The settings were more "desperation" than anything else! If I'd had a tripod I'd have used a much lower ISO and much longer exposure, but the joy of shots like this is that you can leave the high-ISO noise pretty much buried in the shadows.

The other "quick & dirty trick" is to apply a gaussean blur to the whole image (to help remove the noise) and then just use the history brush to revert all the "good stuff".

[Blazing fire]

Nice photo.

Is that flare at the right side of the image where the red and blue lights are?

[Colin Southern]

Nice photo.

Is that flare at the right side of the image where the red and blue lights are?

Hi Blazingfire,

Thanks for the kind words

No, I don't think it's flare - just blown highlights (eg red channel), which is pretty common in this type of image. This was taken with a wide-angle lens, so I was a lot closer to the lights you mentioned, than the others.