Friday night I headed out around our neighborhood to take some photos of my neighbors' Christmas lights. I was worried that some of them might take the lights down over the weekend (turns out that was a poor assumption, but you never know!), and I didn't want to miss them. Natalie really wanted to go with me, so I thought it would be a nice chance to start teaching her about exposure times and using a tripod. I luckily have two tripods, and the smaller of the two is perfect for my Powershot camera that she was using.
We started out in front of our house, attached our cameras to the tripods, and started playing with exposure times. We settled on about 2 seconds, and I talked to her about not moving the camera during the exposure to prevent the photo from being blurry. I'm actually happier with how her photo of our house came out than I am with mine!
We then moved down the street to our neighbors' houses. I really like this photo; the only change I made to this one was to crop it some, as she had a lot of empty space in the foreground.
Here she wanted to get multiple houses in one shot, and did so quite well.
But I almost like the blurred one better!
At this house she took the camera off the tripod and we discussed using a shorter exposure time when hand-holding the camera. The lights were bright enough that the photos still came out quite well!
I like the angle on this one. She wanted to get the moving icicle lights in the tree above and to the left of the snowman.
She did a fantastic job of framing these couple of photos!
Love how she made the lights twinkle.
For the last part of our walk, she took the camera off the tripod again and took some regular exposures. Because of that and the lack of street lights near these houses, the only things that can be seen in these photos are the Christmas lights, but I really like that look! It's as if nothing else is there.
My photos will take a bit longer to go through and edit, and I'm about to leave for a three day trip to Key West for a friend's wedding, so I'll have to share them in the new year. It's nice to be able to leave you with one last Christmas 2013 post, and to have it be photos that Natalie took is even better! Happy New Year, everyone!
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