Camera setting recipe for Christmas lights?

I need a Christmas lights shot for a calendar. My idea is a shot of an extremely large pine decorated with lights that sits on a boulevard in my home town. The road should be busy early evening but full dark here 6pm.

I'd like to get a shot of the tree with really long shutter speed so the traffic moving past is a total blur and the decorated tree static.

I have gear in signature plus a 3 stop ND filter, tripod and remote shutter release cable. Any ideas where to start with camera settings? If I had to guess: 35mm lens with 3 stop ND filter attached, ISO 100, aperture f/11 and start with a 15-second exposure? I'm worried about the tree lights blowing out everywhere.

Hope someone can give a close approximation on where to start. Thanks in advance.

dave

Maybe have a dabble with HDR techniques? Ie the long shot, and then a nice quick one for properly exposed lights, and merge them together.

Just saw this on the Canon site...

http://www.learn.usa.c​anon.com …iday_lights_art​icle.shtml

snyderman wrote in post #13482449
I need a Christmas lights shot for a calendar. My idea is a shot of an extremely large pine decorated with lights that sits on a boulevard in my home town. The road should be busy early evening but full dark here 6pm.

I'd like to get a shot of the tree with really long shutter speed so the traffic moving past is a total blur and the decorated tree static.

I have gear in signature plus a 3 stop ND filter, tripod and remote shutter release cable. Any ideas where to start with camera settings? If I had to guess: 35mm lens with 3 stop ND filter attached, ISO 100, aperture f/11 and start with a 15-second exposure? I'm worried about the tree lights blowing out everywhere.

Hope someone can give a close approximation on where to start. Thanks in advance.

dave

Maybe do (tripod w/mirror lock-up):

1st shot: ISO 1600, f/8 and and 15-seconds

2nd shot: ISO 800, f/6.3 and 20-seconds

See how those come out...(just my suggestions based on my feeble mind! )

A lot depends on the relative brightness of the lights and the ambient scene. Often if you expose to get the lights at their best, you underexpose the tree/surroundings so that context is gone. If you expose for some detail in the tree you risk either blowing out the lights, or possibly lowering the contrast between lights and scene so that the impact of the light is lost. Perhaps you should take some shots exposing for the lights, then pop off a small amount of flash to give a bit of context.

I tried to shoot Christmas lights, and all I got was this...

That is a very cool photo!

@OP. bracket and blend in post. Experiment while you are there using different manual exposure settings. The ND may not be required to get the blur you want, unless you really want a long tail on the cars.

Try to get a night with no breeze so that the tree looks its best.

Try a sunrise with a pedestrian and no cars. Try a sunset at rush hour.

Try a near dusk shot, then move exposure down a couple of stops in post. In other words, shoot day for night.

Thanks, it is one of at least two photos that made it to the POTN Vol 4 book. I was surprised to hear back on that one. I was trying to practice with "painting with light", I had a couple of others that came out, nothing great.

jezzarino wrote in post #13482468
Maybe have a dabble with HDR techniques?

That's about the only way to get detail everywhere, but then you know that. Shoot a series with reference to the live histogram and do exposure fusion or mild HDR and let the traffic ghosting fall where it may for an interesting effect.

The alternative is to paint the tree with a flashlight or strobe while the shutter is open.