How to Take Pictures Christmas Morning | Logan Utah Family Photographer

This is my favorite time of year, when the snow starts to fall and people start to put up their Christmas lights and the tree finally goes up. I have always loved Christmas, the feeling of love and joy that Christmas brings is so refreshing in a world of stress and sad stories. One of my favorite things about Christmas is the time we get to spend with families, and the love that is felt as we laugh and give gifts to each other. Being a photographer, these times are some of my favorite to try and capture those special moments between siblings and families. But snatching those moments up and keeping them forever is never as easy as we think! Our camera never wants to cooperate, and the kids never sit still long enough. But there are a few tricks you can use to help you save those moments for years to come to share with family and friends! Read below for a few hints and techniques!

I spent some time last night with the Cache Valley Photographers Club helping them to work with their camera's (and the kids) to make some nice Christmas photos around the tree in low light. The basics of it are very easy actually, you simply need to gather as much light into you camera as possible with a semi slow shutter speed, large aperture and high ISO. If you're shooting on a manual capable camera, switch it there and set your shutter speed somewhere in the range of 1/100th of a second, much slower than that and you'll get blurry images, but much higher and your pictures will turn out too dark.  Also set your aperture as low as you can, preferably as low f/1.8 or f/2.8 to allow as much light into the camera as possible. Then you're going to need to set the ISO on your camera to ISO 1600 or 3200 to increase the sensitivity of your camera so it can gather light faster.  

1/20th, f/2.8 and ISO 6400