Photographing Kids in in Front of a Christmas Tree {Cypress, TX Children's Photographer}

Hey there! Check out my updated post with way more details on how to achieve this look! It's right HERE!

If you have a camera that allows you to manually control your settings, you can get a shot like this, too!

There are a variety of setting combinations that will produce similar results, but here's what I did:

Turned off all of the lights in the house except for the tree.

Set my aperture at f/1.4. (I looove to shoot wide open when I can.)

Set my ISO low, at 160. I wanted the shutter speed to have to compensate for the low light. (More on that in a minute.)

Metered for the tree, not the girls.

Because there was such little light in the room, and I wasn't allowing much more in with my low ISO, my shutter speed had to be slow. The slower it is, the more light the camera lets in. (That's when you get that long click when you press the button to take the picture instead of a quick, sharp click.) This is also what makes the lights on the tree look so pretty. Mine SS ended up being 1/15! Yes, that is crazy slow!

I also bribed my girls to stand very still for a minute. When you use a shutter speed (SS) that is that slow, movement will be blurry.

Finally, I took this image into Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) because I shoot RAW, and bumped up the exposure just a bit to make it brighter. Voila!!

So, here's the cheat sheet:

Dark room.
f-stop 1.4
ISO 160
SS 1/15


Try it. Play around with your settings a bit. Use a doll or large stuffed animal in front of the tree if

your kids won't be still. Have fun!!!