Tag Archives: #holiday lights

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Christmas Lights with f1.4 50mm

My next Railroad Photography 101 Class at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania will be held on Saturday Dec 13, 2025 from 9 to 11am. The theme to this class will be working with holiday settings, including how to make better night train photographs.

See: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/railroad-photography-101-fall-session-three-tickets-1897166438889?aff=oddtdtcreator

To prepare some material for the class, I went over to Strasburg the other night and made photos of Strasburg Rail Road’s holiday lights around the station using a Nikon Z6-III with f1.4 50mm Nikkor Z-series lens.

With the camera firmly mounted on a 3Pod tripod, I took a series of photos varying the lens aperture from f1.4 (widest setting to f8.0) as a test of the lens abilities. I allowed the camera to automatic adjust the exposure using a matrix metering setting. The white balance was set to A1 (‘auto’) and the color profile to SDR (standard).

The photos displayed here are converted and scaled directly from the Z6-III’s NEF Raw files without any post processing alterations to composition, color, contrast, exposure or any other visual elements of the photo.

This is a work in progress and in following posts, I will explore changes to holiday-night photo RAW files in post processing.

Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f1.4; 1/13th of a second.
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f2.8; 2/5th of a second.
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f4; 4/5th of a second.
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f8; 2.5 seconds.

If you observe carefully, you may notice that the image exposed at f1.4 has a different color balance and is slightly darker that the others. This likely due to the shorter exposure time and the flickering effect of the LED holiday lights.

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Announcements, photography, Rail transit marathon, Tips and Technique

Holiday Lights

I’ve found that successfully photographing holiday light displays requires a bit of patience and some counter-intuitive techniques.

When I used film, a tripod was a necessary requirement. That is not true with modern digital cameras.

I’ve found that my most successful images are exposed when there’s still a hint of light in the sky. These generally look better than when colored lights are photographed against an inky black sky.

For these photos at Greenfield in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I was working with my Nikon Z7-II and 24-70mm lens.

After a little experimentation, I settled on the following settings: ISO 2500, f4, White Balance preset ‘shadow’. I allowed the camera to select the exposure in ‘A’ (auto) mode, but dialed in -0.7 exposure compensation. This was key to avoid over-exposing the lights or allowing the background to appear too bright (my goal was have a dark background, but not so dark as to lose all detail.)

I made some minor adjustments in post processing, including increased saturation, nominal brightening of shadows, and overall adjustment to exposure to better balance the contrast and color.

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