Friday, December 12, 2008

A few pics...

A bit of Christmas, here (not the elephant poster). Why is it so hard to take nice pics of Christmas lights? Flash on, it looks like daylight. Flash off, too dark. BLERGH.





3 comments:

John Mielke Photography said...

Photography is all about light. Your camera is seeing too much light with the flash, and not enough of it without flash.

Flash will overwhelm the tree lights (unless you have a fancy ass external flash that you can adjust).

The solution is to put the camera on a tripod (or available solid surface) and use a longer shutter so that your sensor can absorb the available light from the tree. This will not happen in Auto mode though... you need to have a shutter priority option on your camera, typically denoted by an "S" or "Tv" on your option dial. "S" is for shutter priority (you're giving the shutter the priority instead of the aperture opening). "Tv" is the same thing, but stands for "Time Value."

From there you can adjust the amount of time that the camera will sit there recording the light from your tree.) 1/20 of a second, 1/4 of a second... even 1 second, 2 seconds... 10 minutes.

Oh... and make sure the flash is turned OFF.

Play with that and you should have better luck!

If your camera doesn't have "S" or "Tv" then you're kinda snookered.

JM

Word Verification: Unclapu

Sean Newbury said...

STAMP!
Kitty-approved)

Ma Horton said...

Well this was enLIGHTening to me as well .
VW is "colonsh" .Add a little "it " and now we have sumpin'.