Simple Shooting Tips for Dazzling X’mas Decoration

Simple Shooting Tips for Dazzling X’mas Decoration

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Simple Shooting Tips for Dazzling X’mas Decoration

The Christmas bell is ringing, and the city and malls are all getting ready with colorful Christmas decoration. The dazzling Christmas scene is not only beautiful to look at, but also a wonderful subject for photo lovers to capture. In addition to basic photographic technique, the following shooting tips can help you capture the beautiful Christmas decoration with ease.

Increasing Exposure Compensation

Christmas decoration is usually made up of light bulbs in different colors and highly reflective ornaments. This kind of light source is complicated and bright to the camera. Due to the high scene brightness, the camera’s metering may adjust to a lower exposure level automatically to prevent over-exposure. To capture Christmas decoration in vivid and stunning colors, we suggest to increase the exposure compensation by 1EV (see figure 1). Take a trial shot and adjust according to the shooting environment.
Figure 1
Photo without exposure compensation may appear under-exposed.
By increasing the exposure compensation by 1EV, the photo’s brightness becomes more ideal and natural.

Use of Zoom Burst

Zoom burst is a photographic technique that makes use of the changeable focal length of zoom lenses. Photos with blurred streaks emanating from the center can be created by turning the zoom ring quickly at the press of shutter button.

To create this kind of photo, shutter priority mode (Tv Mode) is preferred and adjust the shutter speed to 1/10s – 1/20s. Turn the zoom ring when the camera starts to expose. A successful image will give us a sci-fi impression of time traveling. Capturing Christmas lights with this technique can liven up the images. We should also use a tripod in order to capture straighter streaks.
The tiny light bulbs on the outer area of the frame become emanating lines in the photo because of zoom burst, giving an impression of space traveling while leading the eyes of viewers to the central snow flake ornament.

Creating Romantic Bokeh

There is something more than Christmas decoration to capture in this joyful season. By deliberately making a photo out-of-focus, nice bokeh effect with a romantic touch can be created (see figure 2).

First, set your lens or camera to Manual Focus and adjust to a larger aperture. Then select an appropriate amount of tiny light bulbs as the subject and take a trial shot towards the light source. Adjust the focus ring according to the level of blurriness of light bulbs. Try several times and you can achieve beautiful, dreamy, round-shaped bokeh.
Figure 2
Set the lens to Manual Focus to achieve out-of-focus effect.

Capturing Details

A wide-angle capture of Christmas decoration can include a lot of subjects and environment in the composition, delivering a sense of space and glamour. However, capturing image from a wide perspective may result in lack of focus and attention to the photo’s theme. We can try creating feature shots with proper use of lens to capture the details of ornaments for a more festive result.
Canon EOS 5D Mark III • EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM • 1/60s • f/2.8 • ISO800
The colorful and dazzling Christmas decoration makes the perfect photographic subject. Apart from the aforementioned techniques and tips, you can also express your creativity and explore different ways of shooting to create some truly distinctive and unique photos of this festive season.
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