Photo Potpourri: CHAPTER 142010 neighborhood yuletide lights, decorations

On the night of Dec. 17, 2010, I did a shoot at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis with fellow members of the Indy Meetup Photo Club.

The meetup occasion was the Conservatory's Candlelight Crossing, an after-dark opportunity to enjoy (and, for us, photograph) the annual Conservatory Crossing holiday lights and decorations. (Quick background: The Conservatory has its yuletide displays available to visit and enjoy the whole month of December, but normally during daylight-only hours. But the Conservatory sets aside one night each December when visitors can observe the spectacle under cover of darkness, and it calls that special night Candlelight Crossing.)

I had taken my relatively new Canon Power Shot G12 to the Candlelight Crossing and was delighted with the pictures it delivered. That experience must still have been vivid in my mind the following night, Dec. 18, because I had an itch to put the G12 to the test again ... under apparently darker, and more challenging conditions.

I had noticed that a lot of the people in the Garfield Park-South neighborhood where I lived put up holiday decorations and lights, so I decided to go out and photograph them with the G12.

I'm sad to say I was not nearly as impressed with the results. The darkness was much more pronounced. On both shoots, I resorted to an ISO of 1600 -- which I'd already learned was one stop past the threshold of what I consider acceptable noise (grain) with the G12. I'd also learned that I could count on getting sharp pictures with the lightweight G12 with shutter speeds far slower than my much heavier DSLR, which had a shutter threshold for hand-held shots of 1/60.

For instance, at the Candlelight Crossing the previous night, I was able to shoot with shutter speeds of 1/25 and still get sharp photos. But the outdoor nighttime neighborhood shoot, but I had to stoop to a maximum speed of 1/10 , and that, it appears, made the difference in not only noise in the images but also their sharpness.

I'm sure that's why, back in 2010, I decided not to do a blog post about this neighborhood holiday decorations. But I am including it here today in this series ... because that was way back then. It was part of my ongoing learning experience in the craft, so I present the images in this post without the benefit of sending them through noise-reduction software ... and fully prepared to absorb the disdain of those who might have been able to handle it far smarter and better.