Shooting Holiday lights?

BobT wrote:

I'd like to take some pictures of the Christmas lights on the house across the street. I need to do this outside; as the trees in my yard obstruct the view somewhat. And....it's very cold and windy right now. So, could you advise a setting from which to start? I shoot with a T2i and would use either my 18-55 STM or 50 1.8 lens. There is a street light near the house. So I'd be concerned about longer exposures lighting up the entire scene. I'm after a clear and SHARP shot of the lighting, but keeping the background around the house otherwise as dark as possible.

Thanks

Would be good if you show us something you can come up with yourself first. We can gauge the amount of light you can work with and move from there.

There's nothing stopping you (except the cold ) from just putting down a tripod and start with green box/automatic mode and take the settings into Av or M mode and move on from there. Like you said if there's strong wind and your subject has motion a faster shutter speed would be good. If you want BAKs radiating stars by using a small aperture like f/16 or f/22, that's one of the parameters that are fixed. Next up is shutter speed. Stopping motion depends on how much it sways with regards to the amount of pixels it covers per second. You may start at 1/60 and move down to whatever you can get away with or move up faster until everything is sharp. Then adjust iso to get a dark background and the exposure you're looking for. Av mode would try to make the picture as bright as day probably, until it hits the 30 second exposure limit. Beyond that you need to get a remote and use BULB mode for longer exposures, but then there's the risk of motion blur. But don't worry experimentation is free, delete the shots you don't want