Thursday photography Tips and Tidbits: How to take beautiful Christmas Tree Pictures

Hello!  Cammi here to offer you some tips to help you take beautiful Christmas Tree pictures!   I will be providing tips for manual settings on your cameras.  I use a Digital SLR camera, but many Point and Shoot cameras will allow you to change your settings to manual.

Here is a brief description of the terminology I will be using.

Shutter Speed: The length of time the shutter remains open.  The slower the shutter speed, the more light is able to enter into the camera.  My personal rule is if the shutter speed is slower than 1/125, I need to use a tripod. Otherwise I will get camera shake, and my image will be blurry.

Aperture (F-Stop): The size of the opening in your lens as you are taking a picture.  The larger the number, the smaller the opening.  (Seems totally backwards, and it took me FOREVER to get the hang of it!  But if you are taking a picture in a dimly lit room, you will want a smaller F Stop.

ISO: How sensitive your camera is to light.   The smaller the ISO, the less sensitive to light.  In a dimly lit room, you may need a higher ISO.  The downside is, the higher the ISO, the grainier your image will be.

Here are some examples of images of my tree I have taken.  I have done no editing to these images, and all were taken using a tripod for stability.

This first image is shot fully on automatic.  I turn all the lights off to take the image. My camera decided it needed a flash, and it exposed the image at 1/60 of a second, F/4, and ISO 400. This image is so blah.  There is no warmth, and you can’t even see the lights.

Next I turn my flash off, and take another fully automatic picture.  This image is improved, but still not like I want it.  The camera took this picture at 1/50, F2.8, ISO 640.

Now I’m going to go fully manual.  Since my room is dark, I know that I need to let more light into my camera to make my image brighter.  So I decide to go with a slower shutter speed, larger aperture, and higher ISO.  My settings were 1/40, f/2.8, and ISO 2000.  Changing to manual has made all the difference.  Look at the image now!

Next I turn on the light in my room, and adjust the settings again.  Now I do 1/25, f2.8, ISO 1000.  There’s not a huge difference, but the lower ISO will result in a less grainy image.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, and please post pictures of your trees!

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