Christmas Lights

Hey! Happy New Year! I hope you all have a fresh start to a wonderful year to come! Well over the past holidays, I've tried out a few Christmas pictures. I always get inspired by those really fancy Christmas tree pictures and I decided to try one out myself. I did have to research a bit to have a good idea on what to set the camera settings to and just how to take the pictures. It took a while to get it right.

Here was my first attempt. With no research or any idea of what I was doing. Just a blue light on the tree. And we have this really old, fake tree with LED lights, not the incandescent white or multi-colored ones. Those are on the stairs right next to the tree. 

This was the second attempt with some background knowledge now. You have to be pretty far away from the lights, and from the subject itself. This picture is decent, except the ornament could have been in focus much better. Notice that there's a light switched on at the right. It's not on in any picture, and having lights on in a room can make a difference. 

Here we have a light with lights in the background. The light is wrapped around the stairs on the side. So it was far enough from the tree to have a blurred light background. The technical term for this would be "bokeh" pictures, meaning "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light".

This is a white light hanging from the stairs. Plus, I took in the brightness of the light unlike the picture above. Notice the blurred lights on the tree are smaller than in the picture above. 

Here are just the lights from the christmas tree alone. You can make out the shape of the tree with the lights. (The Christmas tree is sideways.)

The lights here are bigger and more blurred. In my opinion, the smaller lights look better than these bigger ones. (The tree is sideways.)

Here I have the lights from the tree and from the stairs on the right. I could've made this a much better picture by straightening some things out. Making the stairs lights straight and not tilted. Adding a subject to the picture. Clearing up the lights on the tree, or even adding more lights because it looks awkward having only lights in two sections of the picture. 

This is a similar picture to the one right above. In this picture, the lights are much smaller, and the overall picture is zoomed out. 

Now that there's a better understanding of how to do a bokeh, it'll be much easier to take them later on. Although, I know I need a lot more experience, it's not that easy at first. Try it out for yourself!