Christmas Lights????

Today has been a busy day. One of my clients decided to go forward on the next stage of his project, so I have been putting the final touches on the necessary documents and will be heading back out to the field on Sunday. Towards the end of the day, I went to see my manicurist who put a festive design on my nails for the holidays (sorry guys, I can hear your groans from here! - Hey, I'm a girl! What more can I say).

But, I still hadn't decided what to blip. And, by this time, I knew it had to be a night shot. So, I decided that I would try to find some Christmas lights on houses in the area. That was a dismal experience. I drove all over Reno for at least an hour and found next to nothing. Several years ago, there was a whole street in the north part of Reno where all the neighbors got together and made their houses look fantastic. Not anymore. In fact, I was shocked by the number of dark and vacant houses in the area. It reminded me again of how Reno has been hit very hard by the poor economy and has not recovered. They say it is getting better, but I'm not so sure. When I have been driving by the major stores and malls lately, the parking lots are not full. Even in the large warehouse stores (Costco and Sams) there are very few people. They also say that the housing market is recovering here, but the housing prices are still very low. (So, if you are thinking of moving to a place where housing is less expensive and the cost of living is less than most places in the US, come to Reno.)

So, what does all of this have to do with Christmas lights? - Sorry, I digress.

After driving around and getting more depressed, I found my way back to a viewpoint of downtown Reno. At last I could find festive lights. They are the same lights that are on the buildings all year long, but at least the Eldorado Casino has a little Christmas tree on top.

I parked down a narrow residential street and set up my tripod in the street. I wasn't too worried about traffic since the street was a dead end. After setting up, I took some reference shots. I initially set my ISO at 3200, but decided to bring it down to 1600. I then set my f-stop at f-11 since depth of field or movement were not issues in this shot. I adjusted for the correct exposure with a shutter speed of 1/3 sec. Previous to this shot, I had set for a long exposure, but the surrounding ambient light washed the details out.

After I got home, I converted the RAW images to DNG format, loaded them into Photoshop and selected this shot for further processing. I cropped out the unnecessary elements, and did some slight sharpening.

I haven't done very many night shots, and I realize that I have a lot to learn here. So, you may be seeing more night shots as I learn more how to do these.

Thank you all so much for your wonderful comments, suggestions, stars and hearts on yesterday's blip. I hope you all have a wonderful and restful weekend!

Have a wonderful weekend!