Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...

Next post in my Christmas series: Christmas tree!

I took the liberty of actually preparing for this post by taking pictures of the tree in anticipation of them going on the blog. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this. Now you'll be expecting some elaborate pictures that are beautifully captured with spectacular lighting.

My lighting was lousy. Sorry. I did my best with what I had, but it doesn't always work the way you want it too. Thank goodness for photoshop. And a wonderful friend who lent you theirs. (:

My family and I always go and cut down a tree. Or at least we try to. This year we got to the tree farm a minute after they were supposed to be closing. We got there at 4:31. It usually takes us hours of "I like this one!" "No, what about this one!" "That one has a bald spot! No way!" to pick out a tree. So Dad jumped out of the truck and asked if we could still go and cut down our tree. The man said yes, but we had to be quick. We picked out our tree in, literally, 3 minutes. By the time we picked the tree, cut it down, got it wrapped, and loaded it in the truck it was 4:41. We picked our tree in 10 minutes flat. It was quite the accomplishment.

Did I mention my Christmas tree smells like a citrus fruit?

I'm not joking- it really does. If the internet had scratch-and-sniff I would totally be doing it right now so you could smell it.

Don't ask me what variety of tree it is. I have no idea. All I know is that it smells like a fruit.

Anyway- now onto the Christmas tree photos. Enjoy!

Last Christmas we strung cranberries to go with the popcorn strand we made 3 years ago. My boyfriend had the privilege of helping us with the cranberry one. He was thrilled. (;
This is my Dad when he was little. As you've seen in other photo posts of my Dad, he has a goatee. My cousin, who was 8 at the time, saw this and said "Wow, your dad had a beard when he was little, too!"

I did this picture with two different edits. One in black and white and one in color. I'm not sure which one I like best. Thoughts?
And in conclusion of this Christmas tree post- my Christmas tree in all it's lit up, popcorn stranded, ornamented glory. It didn't turn out so bad for picking it in 3 minutes.
~Becky

Lights!

Welcome to the first post of a series of Christmas posts! The first matter of business- LIGHTS!!
I love Christmas lights, and Christmas light photography is always so much fun. You can do so many creative things with them. And some not so creative things. Or you can try to do creative things and epically fail.. like this one-
The whole 'shaped bokeh' thing is really cool. I've seen some awesome examples of it, however, I have yet to master the art of shaped bokeh. I've got the idea, but not the technique, I guess. Here's the lens hood I made for it-







It's cute, isn't it? Well, it didn't work that well.

I took these with my Nikon D3000, completely manually. I was rather proud of myself for that. I can't tell you what each pictures settings were, but they were an 5.4f, 400 ISO, and somewhere between 1/6 and 1/13 shutter speed. Anyway, onto some better examples of Christmas light bokeh, and a few ornaments. (:

Here is one example of just bokeh. Nothing fancy, just plain old bokeh out of Christmas tree lights, on a small tree. It's kind of cool just by itself, but I like having it focus on something else.

I love how you can see the lights reflected in the snowglobe. It's like double bokeh. (:

Isn't he adorable??
I love this one because you can see the whole antler reflected in the snowglobe. (:

Can you tell I love snowmen? (:
And just because I love my deer, and am a bit of a redneck...
~Becky