Night lights in motion: Creative night techniques for photographing night lights in motion.
Night Lights in Motion
Introduction:
A
lot of effort goes into making cameras and lenses that take sharp
pictures but there are times when I like to throw sharpness out the
window and just have fun with color and lights. There are a number of different techniques for turning night photos into creative light drawings and all of them are fun and easy. Some of these techniques require holding the camera steady on a tripod while the lights move, others are more free form and involve intentionally jiggle the camera during long exposures.
Jiggle the Camera
One of my favorite
tricks is to set the camera with a slow shutter speed (use your
shutter-priority exposure mode to select a long shutter speed) and then
jiggle the camera during the exposure. The technique works particularly
well with Christmas lights because they're very colorful and you get
wild patterns depending on how you move the camera and how long you
keep the shutter open.
The actual shutter speed you use will
depend more on the effect you want than the actual exposure since
you're really not after a perfect exposure, but rather a curious
pattern of color and light. Typically though shutter speeds ranging
from about 1/4 second to one or two full seconds work well and provide
you with enough time to get a good jiggle going. I used an exposure of
1/3 second (in my Nikon camera it's displayed as .3 seconds) to take
this abstract shot of a lighted Christmas ball (one of those 10" balls
with multi-colored lights) and, because I was using the
shutter-priority exposure mode, the camera selected the proper f/stop
for me. I shot dozens of photos of the ball experimenting with
different camera motions: side-to-side, big circles, little circles and
also just randomly shaking the camera. All of the photos were fun to
create and fun to look at.
Perhaps the best part of taking
abstract photos like this is that there are no rules and you can have a
lot of fun not worrying about getting sharp photos. You will have to
turn off your anti-shake mode (if your camera has one) otherwise the
camera is trying to compensate for the motion--one more case of
technology getting in the way of creativity. Shoot lots of pictures
once you find a good subject--you may come up with a great shot for
next year's Christmas cards.