Greeting Cards
One of the Great things you can do with your photos is to turn them into your own personalised greeting cards. One of the places where I get prints done had a very attractive price, so I thought why not put together my Own cards for christmas.
In one of the photography forums I visit there was a bit of discussion about taking photos of Christmas trees, so after reading the info I decided that I would have a go at it myself and try and get a suitable picture of my own christmas tree for use on my christmas cards.
Now, I will just go over some of the main things that the forum discussed about shooting christmas trees. The hardest thing to do is to get a well-exposed picture of your tree and to also capture your lights on the tree means a combination of a few techniques.
The 2 things that you will need to do is to have a long exposure time to capture the Lights on the tree, and then you also need to use Flash to correctly expose the rest of the tree. The general consesus was that a reasonable starting point was to use an aperture suitable for the DOF required and use around a 10 second exposure and fire the flash on the 2nd Curtain.
So, I set up the Camera on a tripod and framed the shot. Decided on a suitable Aperture to give me the correct DOF and started taking shots.
I tried several things before I found something that worked and gave me a correctly exposed tree and yet still managed to capture some of the Lights. I started off shooting at around a 5 second exposure and a single off-camera Flash.
My first few shots were pretty dissapointing - they were very dark and the only thing visible was the lights. So, I upped the exposure time by a few seconds and tried again. Yes, there was an improvement, but when I fired the flash, I still didn't have everything exposed properly. Here is one of the shots that I took during my experimentation. You will note that the top half is exposed OK, but there is a lot of very dark areas that lack detail and also that the bottom half is severely under-exposed.
The above shot was done at f22, 20 Second exposure @ ISO 100 using a single flash to the right hand side at 45 degrees (look at the shadow to get an idea where the flash was)
So, at this stage, I grabbed a 2nd flash and set it up to add more light to the scene. I saw an immediate improvement and also noted that I simply didn't need as small an aperture as I was shooting with to get what I wanted.
It took about 5 or 6 attempts before I had both Flashes set up at the correct spots to give me a nice even exposure and after about 20 minutes total I finally came up with a shot that I was happy with.
And here is the final Processed Picture that I used for my Christmas cards.
You will note a few things in comparision to the first picture - you can see that the overall lighting is pretty even. Look at the wall - it is pretty much the same colour all the way from the roof to the floor - not perfect, but a lot better than the 1st picture!
If you look at the shadows you can probably work out where the 2 flashes were located. One was slightly to my left - about 1 metre from the Camera - and it was aimed so that it bounced most of the light off the ceiling. The other flash was pretty much in the same place as the first shot - to my Right at about 45 Deg.
In order to get rid of some of the clutter I did need to crop the picture slightly to get the finished photo. Now, the final shot ended up being at F8 for 30 Seconds @100 ISO, with 2 Flashes firing and no lights on in the room.
I took my photo and went to the lab and had my custom christmas cards printed. When I picked them up, I can only say that yes, it was worth the effort to be able to make a card with my own photo on it rather than buying a card the same as everyone else is sending out.
Now, The only question that you are asking is why is the darn tree upside down? Well, the short answer is that with the tree upside down there is more room for presents under it!
It might have sounded simple to grab your camera and point it at the tree and take a picture, but in reality, it really was a fairly difficult thing to photograph that relied on a combination of several techniques to acheive the desired result.
