Community Corner

Tips to Photograph Holiday Lights

Capturing Christmas lights on your camera can be a challenge. Get some tips. Photograph your lights. You could win $100,000.

Are you one of those lovers of the holidays that puts up sparkly ights to see how pretty they look when it gets dark?

If so, we know you want to capture those lights on your camera. However, getting those lights to look right in your pictures can be more of a challenge than you bargained for.

Professional photographers have lot of experience and cameras with all sorts of settings that most of us wouldn’t know what to do with.

Here are three tips for the amateur photographers out there.  

  1. Turn off your flash. If you use a flash, your automatic settings with respond to the light of your flash and your holiday lights won’t show up.
  2. Use a tripod. You just turned off your flash. That means that your camera is going to try to make up for having less light but leaving the lens open longer. This means any tiny movement you make will likely blur your picture. If you have no tripod, improvise. Set your camera on a flat surface and take the picture or lean your body and arms against a tree or car to keep yourself as steady as possible.
  3. Shoot at dusk, not full dark. Most of the time, you can do better with that little light left in the sky and still see the lights.

Use these tips to take a picture of your holiday lights. Post the picture to one of the Lilburn-Mountain Park Patches' Deck the Halls contest page and you could win $100,000 for your school district.

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Want to get more technical than that? Here are some other resources for taking holiday photographs.

Find out what's happening in Lilburn-Mountain Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.


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