Winter and Holiday Photography Tips

I am still suffering with a real nasty winter cold, so again today I am going to let others do most of the talking. I came across a couple of interesting articles on the cameraworld.com web site that may help you take better holiday pictures and tips on handling your camera in cold weather.

The first article is about taking pictures of holiday lights. I found it informative and it may give you some tips for shooting your Christmas tree and the lights on your house (or your neighbors). It is worth a read.

The second article is about the special precautions you should use to handle your camera when shooting outside during winter. The only thing it didn't really cover was photographing snow scenes. Because snow is so bright, it can fool the camera's automatic exposure meter so that snow pictures have a more grayish cast than white. Here are two examples I shot just the other day that exhibit this point.

The first picture shows a winter scene using automatic exposure. The second picture was shot by changing from automatic exposure to a special a special setting on my camera for snow. Neither picture was touched up, except for sharpening.

Many digital cameras have special settings to cover different kinds of photography conditions. You should check and see if your camera has a special setting for snow, then use it when you have to. On my camera, the snow setting increases the exposure by 1/3 of a stop and sets the white balance to 6000K.

As for shooting Christmas lights, my camera also has a special setting for shooting night scenes. But, I also experimented with automatic and manual settings and found that I could pretty much get the same shots without the special setting. If you would like to see a few examples of some of my night Christmas light photos taken around town, check out my web site.

Of course, they were all taken with my camera mounted on a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, you can set your camera on a small bean-bag to give it stability. Low light night time shots always require a shutter speed that is too slow to hand-hold.