Need some help, please!

[Shuffinator]

Hello all. I am new here to TPF. Ive got a rebel t6 with a 18-55mm and 75-300
I have a side business during the holidays installing christmas lights. I would like some good pictures of my work to share to other people and show what I can do. The pictures I look last christmas didn't turn out how I would like. I feel like I want the lights to pop more. What can you guys suggest?
Thanks for all the help!
-Shuffinator

 

[ac12]

Delicate balance.
To make the lights "pop" you need everything else BLACK.
But you also want the house kinda dark so that you can sort of see it but minimized, like pix2 and 3.

• pix1 seems like it might be over exposed, the lights have a white center, which I view as being burnt out.
• pix2 looks pretty good. Maybe another shot with less exposure.
• pix2 and 3, if you turn the house lights off, there is more contrast for your lights.
• It looks like all 3 shots, they are slightly overexposed. The lights look burnt in.

BRACKET like crazy, cuz you don't know which exposure will look best until you look at them on the computer.

 

[Gary A.]

I suggest you make the lights pop in post processing. You need some details in the house for context. In post you can make the lights brighter while not effecting the lighting of the house. I would suggest shooting some images at 18mm and get real close to a single bulb with the rest of the lighting trailing off into the background and others with the 300mm (and a tripod) compressing the foreground with the background. Additionally, I'd get a star screw in filter for your 18-55. The star filter has these minute little lines etched into them which will make light sources flare out adding significant drama to the scene. Be creative and careful. In #2 you cut off the right edge, which had more lights in favor of the left edge which had no lights. In #3 the house is tilting to the right. Fill the frame with your subject.

 

[texxter]

This is a fairly technical lighting problem. The issue is that in order for the Christmas lights to be visible, it has to be dark, but if it's dark then you can't really see the house. In an ideal image, like this one, for example, you want to be able to see both the house and the lights. There are a couple of ways to achieve this - one is to have one exposure for the house and another for the light, and then merge them together. You can use HDR processing, or you can do it by hand. I would recommend starting with a 5-exposure HDR merge to see what you get. The other way to achieve this is to put light on the house. If the house already has landscape lighting, turn them on. Also turn indoor lights. If you don't have light on the house you can add light with multiple Home Depot hot lights, and you may need to merge images if you don'have enough lights for the entire house. Obviously this second approach is going to be more costly and tricky than the first one.

The sky probably needs to be processed separately, so that it's not pitch black.

Good luck!

 

[adamhiram]

If you want to get it in a single exposure, try shooting at dusk when there's still enough light to illuminate the house and have some texture in the sky, but dark enough to see the lights. This will give you enough dynamic range to decide in post how much of the house you want to show and how light or dark you want the sky to be. You won't have quite as much control as @texxter's HDR method, but if you can get there at the right time of day, it should make for less work to get better images.