Sheldon,

These photos turned out great! Thanks for taking them, along with the Christmas lights displays shots gallery. The event was a lot bigger than I had imagined. Unfortunately, I had another commitment that evening. Hopefully I can make it next year.

It appears that the photos were taken without flash, handheld and using a high ISO speed. Did I get those right? Did you have the camera set on auto, or maybe you used shutter priority of something like 1/125 sec.? Did you do any post-exposure editing? Thanks for your night shooting insights. The new camera I'm interested in buying is just about to be released.

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Yup, no flash, no pod, and 600-800 ISO speed on most of the shots. There were a few that I used a flash on. In low light settings, I usually use all manual settings. Can't recall the shutter speed, but you can't get away with anything slower than 1/10 sec when there's as much movement as there was in the Carol of Lights photos.

The Carol of Lights started around 5:00pm so I got in as many shots as I could in the first hour while there was still a little light out. There was also some lighting on the scene there to help with the lighting situation so the ones that really came out were likely ones in which I had a little help.

There was some post editing on most of the photos... mostly to increase the exposure digitally and some adjustments to the temperature of the colors.

It's been a year since I've done the light display shooting so I'm brushing up on my own tips. The thing I just remembered the other day was to use flash and narrow the aperture when you run into the problem of some lights in the photo overexposing when you leave the shutter open longer to get the dimmer stuff.

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