Merry Christmas 2013

Merry Christmas everyone… We hope you have had a great Christmas holiday, and are looking forward to the new year. We like to take this opportunity and wish you, and all your friends and family a wonderful new year full of happiness and prospertity.

One great aspect of Christmas celebrations is the amazing decorations that are set up all over the city. Within Orange County, CA, there are a few places which are particularly famous for rich decorations and beautiful Christmas lights. Some of them are listed here.

Today we stopped by the cross street of Red Hill Ave. and Olwyn Dr. in Tustin, which is a bit closer to where we live. We had our cameras and, as shown below, took a few shots of the amazingly decorated houses.

As expected with any Christmas light photography, lighting was pretty challenging. Moving from one section to the next, the lights would completely change both in intensity and in color, making it quite a challenge to constantly adjust the settings on our camera. Using Flash in these situations is not recommended as it will typically overpower and wash out your image and will result in loosing details of the Christmas lights. Thus, without the flash, we had to open up the aperture to f/2.8 and bump up the ISO to 6400 in many of the pictures in order to maintain reasonable shutter speeds for our handheld shots. Of course, if we had the luxury of setting up a tripod, we could have afforded slower shutter speeds and hence could have gotten away with much smaller ISO levels. We left White Balance setting to Auto, and the camera seemed to do a decent job in adjusting it as needed. Of course, we always shoot in RAW and hence have full control over White Balance in Post Processing, when needed.

Here are some of our shots. Hope you enjoy them. If you are in the area, stop by. Watching these wonderful decorations up close is a lot of fun.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…