Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

4.0 sec @ f/10, ISO 400, 21 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS)

We put the Christmas tree up today.  Most of the decorations found their way on the tree too by way of my lovely fiancée.  During this holiday season, I want to try out a couple of “tricks” that I have been reading about on various blogs for photographing holiday lights.  Tonight, I played around with the lens aperture to achieve the starburst effect on the Christmas tree lights.

The trick to getting the starburst effect, whether it be for tree lights or any other light source, is to use a wide aperture.  I used f/10 for this shot.  Because the aperture was so wide, I needed a long exposure to capture enough light from the little tree lights to exposure the rest of tree.  It should be no surprise that I had to mount the camera on a tripod.  The last element I used in creating the raw imagine in the camera was adding some additional light to the angel tree topper.  I used a gridded strobe atop a fully extended light stand.  I used a full CTO gel on the flash too.  However, it looks like I could have stacked a few gels together to better match the color of the light from the strobe to the color of the tree lights.

In post-processing, I desaturated the background walls and the floor.  I also increased the saturation of the ornaments to try and make them pop a bit more.  My last edit was adding a bit of a vignette around the image.