Happy 4th of July Everyone!

No tripod necessary for these - set a slow shutter speed (maybe 1/20 second) with 2.8 aperture and bump up the ISO a little bit. No noise removal :)

Balboa Boat Parade

No, I did this on purpose.



These are pictures from the Christmas Boat Parade at Balboa peninsula Island. Suprisingly, the houses were more decked out than the boats. Some went a little TOO far with the decorations. One of them even had a big snowman made out of real snow - rich people are pretty outrageous sometimes. The last picture was taken by putting the camera on manual focus to get those light spheres. Cool huh?

I found this helpful VIDEO on taking pictures of holiday lights, even with small cameras. My advice is just to do a trial-and-error and don't just trust the LCD screen without zooming in. Because it's such a small screen, things appear sharp even when they're slightly out of focus. I personally prefer higher ISO and faster lenses to cumbersome tripods. You can clean up the noise easily and modern DSLR cameras look great even at high ISOs. Have fun.

Update: Some INCREDIBLE award-winning nature photos HERE. (A must see)