Christmas has become one of the most entertaining times of the year, and not just for kids. For us, this is a great opportunity to practice photography with our equipment and at the same time, to produce pictures worthy of being framed, but how can we translate the essence of the feast of the dead into the image? And most importantly: how do you take great Christmas photos? All these questions, you will be able to answer them with these 10 tips. And when it comes to sweets, read the post carefully until the end. So whether you’ve tried taking great Christmas photos on other occasions or it’s the first time and you don’t know how to immortalize the holiday, here are all of our tips!
Creative effects on your Christmas photos
1. Lightpaint your photos
Personally, it’s one of the techniques that fascinates me the most. Painting in the air remains a great alternative and it is even more the case for your Christmas photos. With lightpainting, you can create scenes of terror just by applying a halo of light or creating an entire scene full of spooky images.
There is a very useful accessory for this occasion, it is Pixelstick. It is a tool that will allow you to master lightpainting and photography with light to a higher level. You will be able to create thousands of patterns, graphics and other elements . You can invent whatever you want with it, then project it onto a photo . Here you just have to find a scary image and reproduce it on your photos. The results could be these:
2. Give the main role to the lighting in your Christmas photos
One of the secrets to taking great Christmas photos is to create mystery or instill fear in the viewer and lighting is the key to achieving this. If we master it completely, there will be no limits to translate everything we had in mind into the image.
My advice is to use the light, be it from your flashlight or cobra flash, from above or from low angle to give a sinister look to the image. If you do not want to burden yourself with lighting accessories, you will find a flashlight, a candle or the like to generate this effect, which marks the shadows and brings out the features of a face, a silhouette.
3. Apply the Bokeh effect on your Christmas photos
When you think of the bokeh effect, lots of Christmas pictures or pretty portraits certainly come to mind, but it is also an effect that can make your Christmas photos stand out . Indeed, the bokeh relies on the blur. This type of blur will allow you to focus the viewer’s interest on the precise point in the image, whether it is a person or an object.
To obtain a nice background blur, it will be necessary to be able to count on a cine prime lens with an aperture of less than f / 3.0 and, if possible, with 9 diaphragm blades. The bokeh effect will be more rounded and professional.
4. Dare to flashpaint
What is that ? How is flashpainting different from lightpainting? You must have asked yourself these questions, so know that lightpainting is the most famous and extensive technique that relies on the realization of drawings and silhouettes in the air, while flashpainting allows you to design an image. with an improbable lighting scheme or else developed from a single point of light. You accumulate as many images as you want and then put them together and the result may look like the image below.
5. Use light modifiers and color gels
Have you considered light modifiers or color gels for cobra flash? They are economical and very versatile accessories but they will not only serve you for your Christmas photos but they will also allow you to improve the lighting of your shots, day after day, and at the same time, your technique too.
6. Produce the strobe effect
This is an unrecognized effect that some cobra flash allows , often with really spectacular results , so it could be a really useful technique for your Christmas photos. Strobe photography is based on integrating a complete sequence of moving elements into a single image.
7. Create wakes of individuals in your Christmas photos
You have surely used this technique before when you were traveling. Sometimes photographing the most iconic places in the city is complicated for a large number of people around, so resorting to low shutter speeds will help eliminate them altogether. For your Christmas photos, you could use a speed of 1/30 sec or higher to make the protagonists look like ghosts or creatures from Beyond.
You can also play with longer exposure times than usual in landscape photos but to do this, it is not enough to look for an environment that can transmit terror but the weather factor is also to be taken into account. : If you are working with a cloudy sky, the desired effect will be easier to achieve, as in the image below.
8. Play with silhouettes
Without a doubt, this is a fantastic way to get spooky photos very easily, with silhouettes. Simple images with a great emotional charge, to be obtained with a very contrasting background, as in the following images. You can use a canvas or a sheet for the background or even trigger against the light in a dark street. You will not be disappointed with the result.
9. Work in black and white
Black and white is one of the techniques that convey the most drama and aesthetics because it can touch more the essence of the message since it dispenses with the distraction brought by the color, so why not resort to it to your Christmas photos? It is a fascinating way to convey fear, terror, or mystery. And that’s all we look for on Christmas, right?
10. Double exposure
These are photos that seem to have a very complex creation process, but in fact, they are so easy to produce that it is hard to believe them. Take two photos, one with dominant elements and the other very simple, then combine them using editing software!
