Travis wrote a great post recently about shooting holiday lights with just your camera in hand — truth be told, it's how I'd prefer to do it, since I'm a lazy man and like to travel light. But I got a new lens recently, and I wanted to see how it performed under a variety of circumstances. I headed to a nearby neighborhood, with a tripod, to shoot a couple of gaudy displays.

The owner of this house is full of holiday spirit.

Here are some tips for getting sharp shots when shooting long exposures on your tripod:

1. Choose the lowest ISO setting. You'll see less noise in the shadows, and since the tripod's keeping your camera still, you don't need the faster shutter speeds that boosting the ISO gives you.

2. Choose an aperture between f/8 and f/11. All lenses are different, but the "sweet spot" for sharpness is usually in this range.

3. Turn off your noise reduction. All digital cameras use some degree of noise reduction when making jpeg images. It's buried In a menu somewhere. Check to see if some form of "long exposure noise reduction" is working against you. It'll reduce the noise in the shadows, but it will also tend to smear the details you want to keep. Another alternative is to shoot in RAW, where noise reduction is not applied.

4. Turn off any trick modes like dynamic range optimizers — they add noise to shadows. These are called something different by every camera manufacturer. Nikon calls it "D-Lighting," Canon calls it "Auto Lighting Optimizer," and Sony calls it "Dynamic Range Optimizer." They're all good at lightening backlit daylight shots, but struggle in the dark. Shooting in RAW also bypasses these modes.

5. Use your camera's self-timer to make sure no camera shake is present. Pressing the shutter button, no matter how carefully you do it, shakes the camera a tiny bit. If you have a shutter release cable or remote, use that instead.

Santa knows where the point of entry is at this particular house.

If your camera has a mirror lock-up feature, use that, too. It flips up and locks the mirror in place before opening the shutter, eliminating the miniscule amount of shake caused by the mirror flipping open.

The picture below is cropped from the one above, and reveals a "sunstar," which is a result of a longer exposure at a smaller aperture. You can actually count the number of blades in the aperture mechanism based on how many points the star has. Most of today's lenses have 6-9 blades; 6- and 8-bladed apertures make sunstars with 6 and 8 points, respectively, while 7- and 9-bladed apertures make 14- and 18-pointed stars. Just another reason to "stop down" (close up the aperture) and shoot a long exposure!

This 14-point sunstar means my lens has 7 aperture blades.

Our examples both involve shooting pictures of the lights after it was already dark outside — but check out this post from the wonderful photo blog Strobist: they make the case for getting out a little earlier in the day, when there's still a little light left in the sky. This video from 5min.com backs up that point, and I'd have to agree. It will help you to frame your shots better and provide a little detail in the areas that are black in our pictures.

And you're not alone in your quest for holiday lights photo perfection — check out this flickr group dedicated to the subject.

Like Travis said in his post, just play around! The freedom to fail — and delete your mistakes — is one of the joys of digital photography. Rules are made to be broken, just shoot and have fun.