Take Your Holiday Photography to the Next Level!
It’s that time of the year again. The festive mood starts spreading, the Christmas tree is going up and more importantly everyone is happy to gather around it with their loved ones again. This certainly make for an energetic and exciting period to immortalize some truly beautiful memories. And what better way to do that than capturing some stunning images. Here are some tips for shooting breath-taking holiday photos.
1. Christmas Lights & Ornaments
Some staples you’ll find in nearly every Christmastime photograph are the Christmas lights and ornaments, 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. 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.
2. Express Relationships
The holiday season is all about family and relationships. The stress and pressure of the passing year may wear on everyone, yet everyone is glad to relax and spend time with family. You have a chance to take photographs that define emotional moments for years, if not decades to come. The joy of the “giving season” amplifies your subjects, so they’ll be more expressive when you ask them to pose together. Try to position family members and friends in a way that enables you to capture the bonds between them.
3. Capture the Preparation Stages
The actual Christmas meal or party is obviously the best part of the day, but there are other photographic opportunities, particularly in the preparations stages of the day.
- Food preparation
- Putting up decorations
- Wrapping gifts
- Kids throwing a tantrum while getting dressed in their Christmas outfits
- Setting the table
The shots before the event starts properly are often great because they show everything at it’s best before everyone descends on your party zone.
4. Take Group Portraits
You want to make sure that you, the photographer, are in some of the important family photos as well. You might want to position everyone by the Christmas tree and have some presents in the composition too, or maybe around the dinner table to show a close family meal (or both). Use a tripod for this group shot, because you’ll want to use the camera’s timer so you can get in the photo too. Your camera’s timer is a nifty little feature that many people don’t use enough or even know about. It’s simple to work; you just set your exposure values (shutter, ISO and aperture), compose your frame, set the timer interval (between 3 – 10 seconds), then press the shutter.
5. Opening Gifts
There are certain moments during a Christmas gathering that are filled with all manner of photographic opportunities and the opening of gifts is like no other in that it is filled with an array of emotions, facial expressions and excitement – especially if you’ve got kids around. Switch your camera to burst mode (sometimes called continuous shooting mode) and take lots of shots at this time of the festivities. You’ll find you end up with some excellent series of shots when you do this that capture everything from the anticipation of getting the wrapped gift, through to the excitement of unwrapping to the joy (or occasionally disappointment) of seeing what’s inside. Don’t forget to shoot the reactions of those who give the gift as well.
