It’s that time of year. The lights are up everywhere, and you head out to enjoy the outdoor displays with your family. You drive around town looking for an inviting plot of illuminated holiday cheer, and take some quick snapshots with your camera. You don’t want washed-out blurry photos, but you only have your digital SLR camera and it’s not practical to set up a tripod. So what do you do?

Here are a few quick tips to help get your holiday photo shoot going.

Turn that flash off!
The high intensity of the flash will blast out the color details and the warm feel of the dangling lights. Don’t use it! Instead, use a higher ISO setting. The shots that you see here were taken on a Nikon DSLR camera with an ISO of 800. You can push this up higher to a 1000 or even up to a 1600 ISO, but keep in mind that the higher you go, the more noise you introduce to your picture.

Use the Aperture priority mode
Open up the aperture really wide. This allows more light to hit the sensor and keeps the shutter speed fast to help avoid longer exposure time. The longer the shutter is open, the more potential blur you can get on the picture.

Use a sturdy object to stabilize the camera.
If you don’t have a tripod, then a fence post, low wall, tree, even a bird bath can give you enough bracing to keep the camera trained on a fixed point long enough to capture a sharp image. Plus you have the advantage of using more zoom if the camera is well-braced. Built-in image stabilization can make the difference between a great framed photo you put up on the wall or a deleted file in the camera’s recycling bin. Many cameras have this feature. It’s a definite time saver, so use it.

Adjust your camera’s exposure compensation.
You may find that fine tuning exposure compensation just a little can make a low-light image come out a bit brighter.

Feel free to experiment.
The more you play with your camera’s settings and features, the more you learn what to do, or even more importantly, what NOT to do when taking photos. Don’t be afraid to shoot and delete as often as necessary to get the photo you really want.

 
Here's what happened when we took a Nikon D80 and a Nikon D60 SLR digital camera and visited a spectacular holiday display close to Crutchfield. Using the tips listed above, we came back with the following shots.
 

For the front of the house, we used the Nikon D80, with an ISO setting of 1600, and an f-stop of 5 (f/5.0).  

Here's a closeup of some of the decorations. We shot this with the Nikon D60, using an ISO setting of 800, f/5.3. 

You can see this NOEL sign in the first picture. We took this closer shot with the Nikon D60, with an ISO setting of 800, f/4.5 (we used the same camera and settings to shoot the mailbox image at the top of this blog post).

In an ideal world, we would have used a tripod to get this shot. Even though the lights are a little blurred, we still think this hand-held shot works fairly well. If your camera has image stabilization, it can help make a shot like this clearer. We used the Nikon D80 with an ISO setting of 1600, f/5.3.