With it being Christmas time I wanted to share little bit about lighting. It is always tricky getting the perfect picture in front of the Christmas lights or roaring fire in the fire place. Far too often pictures are over exposed making the picture dull, or not exposed enough and the people end up black. Some times you want the people to appear like shadows but other times you want to be able to see their beautiful faces.

This is when lighting, and camera settings come into play.

When I am trying to take a low light photo, there are a few tips I follow…

1. Turn off your flash unless you’re going to defuse or bounce it.
2. Use natural window light if at all possible. YES! Choose to take them in the daylight.
3. If you are using window light…. Turn off all overhead lights and or lamps.
4. If its dark or no windows are working, then try changing your ISO.

When your staging a photo, Stage it as if you are coming through the window so that the window light is directly in front of the person you’re photographing. This is going to give you the most natural light and there is less of a change that you will have to edit it in post processing.

If you want to blue your background some, move the person that your shooting a few feet in front of the background that way you can change your aperture (make it larger) it changes your depth of field and create Bokeh. Bokeh is the lights on the tree becoming blurry light balls.

Try out some of these tips and let me know what you think!

With love,
Taylor