Photography Tips for Christmas

Photography Tips

It’s just a few days until Christmas so I thought a quick tutorial on the topic of Christmas Photography might be appropriate. Hopefully this will give you some good Christmas photo ideas.

Prepare – Making a List, checking it twice….

Making sure you’re ready to capture any planned event is part of the key to a successful Photography shoot. Getting yourself ready but also the location of your shots is worthwhile.

Pack the camera – goes without saying? I forgot mine last year in the rush to get the car packed.

Make sure your batteries are charged and you have extras and/or the re-charger packed.

Pack extra memory cards – have them empty and ready to fill up

Put someone on ‘photos’ – our family has someone on drinks, main course, dessert – why not put someone on ‘photos’ so that in the craziness of the day they don’t get forgotten.

Consider the light in the room that you’ll be photographing in. Is there enough light? Will you need a flash? Are the backgrounds too cluttered and distracting?

Christmas lights and ornaments are the holiday decorations you’ll find in nearly every Christmastime photograph; they’re a staple, but they’re also a cliché staple. You’ll want to find ways to utilize them in inventive ways – extreme close ups or just having them dominate the frame where the “subjects”, the people, populate the background to give dimension and suggest depth.

Don’t be afraid to unplug lights so they might be off directly behind your subject, but turned on in the opposite side of the frame… it’s a way to balance the composition and not add a distracting element. Another interesting and effective technique you can employ when photographing ornaments and Christmas tree lights is the Bokeh technique.

With Bokeh, you use the blurred or soft focus part of an image (that’s just outside of the depth of field) as part of the image composition. One way to enhance the effect is to place a piece of black paper board with a shape cut out of it in front of the lens, and the soft-focus/blurred light halos will take on the shape of what you cut into the paper board  It’s a neat effect that can add character to your photographs.

Macro

Your decorations will make great macro subjects and create some interesting festive Photography shots. Baubles on trees, centre pieces and other ornaments make great macro subjects. When shooting a macro of a bauble, try putting coloured material behind the tree to add interest to the shot. If you can, shoot with a wide (low number) aperture to throw the background and fairy lights out of focus.

Food

Why not take some mouth watering shots of the turkey fresh out of the oven, and other festive treats? Gingerbread men and mince pies make for festive foodie shots too. Trim the plate up to add some interest, maybe a sprig of holly and some tinsel, and you’ll have a fantastic festive shot.