Christmas Lights in Collingswood

Nothing gets you in the holiday spirit like Christmas lights, especially when their glow lights up a darkened street in the middle of a winter's evening.

Collingswood, all your lovely homes have been on display for a few weeks now. Photographer Rich Ratner snapped these shots of some of the most festive homesteads in the borough. We hope you enjoy them.

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Here are three tips for the amateur photographers out there.  

1. Turn off your flash. If you use a flash, your automatic settings will respond to the light from your flash and your holiday lights won’t show up.
2. Use a tripod. You just turned off your flash. That means your camera is going to try to make up for having less light by leaving the lens open longer. This means any tiny movement you make will likely blur your picture. If you have no tripod, improvise. Set your camera on a flat surface and take the picture or lean your body and arms against a tree or car to keep yourself as steady as possible.
3. Shoot at dusk, not full dark. Most of the time, you can do better with that little light left in the sky and still see the lights.

Want to get more technical than that? Here are some other resources for taking holiday photographs.

• New York Institute of Photography
• MacWorld
• Strobist Blog
• eHow
• Turner Photographics
• Canon
• Snapfish
• Olympus