Rebecca provided the inspiriation for this week's assignment. She loves Christmas, and could probably walk around the city for hours admiriing the Christmas lights. I thought the bright and colorful lights of Christmas would be a wonderful opportunity to practice techniques for photographing lights. You will probably need to use a tripod or some sort of camera support, or bump up your ISO in order to get a fast enough shutter speed to prevent prevent motion blur. (Bumping up your ISO too much will result in digital noise in the image, so using a camera support and lower ISO will result in better quality images.)
You will probably also have to adjust your exposure so that you don't blow out (over expose) the bright lights. If your scene contains substantial areas of dark, it will fool your meter into "over exposing" the image, and you will need to use negative exposure compensation (or manual exposure). It may be hard to see the small areas of over-exposure on your histogram, so try using the blinking highlights function on your camera's image display to determine (and compensate) if you are blowing out the highlights.
Remember to frame your image so the lights are arranged in a pleasing composition, and eliminate as much dark "dead space" from the image as possible.
The topic for the week of 15-21 December 2008 is "Lights." Please upload your image to the "Lights" album in the "Weekly Assignments" category of the gallery no later than midnight, Mountain Time (GMT - 07:00) on Sunday, 21 December 2008.
