Holiday Lights

    This is a shot of the holiday lights on the handrail of the deck in my backyard.

    Shot was made with a Canon Digital Rebel DSLR mounted on my wonderful new Manfrotto 718B (Christmas present to self) tripod with a Canon 28-135mm EOS IS lens at 100mm, with a Canon EF-12 II extension tube.  Auto-focus and Image-stabilization were turned off.

    This is my favorite of about a dozen pictures.  Exposure was set to -1 stop at f/8 1/30 sec at ISO 400 in early morning freezing rain.  I tried opening the lens to f/4.5 to keep the background out of focus, but discovered that f/8 gave a brightly bounded textured hexagonal appearance to the colored lights in the background.  The Gimp was used to select and sharpen the foreground light bulb, fix the color balance a bit, scale the image for the web and enhance grainy-ness.  I like how the water droplet hanging down from the light bulb in the foreground acts like a lens, showing a tiny inverted view of the backyard.

    Given the chance to do this again, I'd shoot a white piece of paper to use for a custom white-balance reference point, and would try to alter the composition by moving in closer to the foreground bulb, so there would be only a few surrounding background lights, possibly arranged in a triangle.  Maybe shooting at ISO1600 would have given the grainy appearance direct from the camera.  It's not always easy to think of these things while freezing in the rain, covering the camera with a ziplock bag and waiting for the wind to die down.  Consideration was given to using the Gimp to put a cross shaped starburst on the foreground light, but decided the it was prominent enough as-is.

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updated: Sun Apr 26 20:21:47 EDT 2009