Warm Springs – The Lights Of Christmas

Dec 23 2009

Warm Springs – The Lights Of Christmas

Published by CLS at 1:11 pm under Places In Seattle To Take Great Photos

One million lights and so much more…..

Christmas Lights at Warm Springs

This time of year it seems it’s always dark – so you might as well take advantage of it and photograph at night.

I had the chance to do just that last night at The Lights Of Christmas.We originally planned to go on Monday – but the rain was coming down in buckets and I just didn’t feel up to taking my camera out in the rain (or myself for that matter).

Last night was perfect – not especially cold and at certain parts of the evening the fog floated in and around the lights.

Take a tripod and set your camera to about 800 ISO. I took a few photos before settling in on the bracketed exposure parameters I wanted. I set my camera to ’spot meter’ and bracketed exposures at 1 1/2 over and under. I decided to take a monopod instead of a tripod – for safety reasons. It was dark and lots of people and children are milling around, which meant I had to use a very wide open aperture – f/3.5 which gave me a very shallow depth of field and a few shots were very blurred. (Next year I’ll bring a tripod or invest in one of those monopods with feet for more stability). I saw another photographer using a tripod and in fact if you look closely you’ll see him in one of my photos – LOL.

I shot in RAW which gave me much more flexibility in post processing.

To find more about the Warm Springs Lights Of Christmas - and do a night photo walk visit their website at: warmbeach.com

Keeping Warm By The Fire

Dress warm. Not exactly wheelchair accessible (several dirt tracks with uneven ground) - but I did notice there were electric carts with folks being given the tour. Call ahead, I think they’ll accommodate your needs.

blue mountain

For the shot above I used a star filter on my lens instead of waiting to put the effect on in post production editing – the light from the electric car adds an nice effect blended with the wisps of fog.

I think The Bait Shop is my favorite of the series. My only regret is no tripod so that I could create a HRD from this. But with a monopod one simply can not stay still long enough to capture the necessary three consecutive shots.