How to take photos of China Lights
Capturing the beauty has its challenges
The China Lights festival — which drew more than 100,000 visitors to Boerner Botanical Gardens last fall — returns this week, and among those doing a happy dance are professional and amateur photographers alike.
“China Lights: The Magic Returns” runs Sept. 22 through Oct. 22 at the botanical gardens, 9400 Boerner Drive, Hales Corners. Nearly 50 handmade giant lantern displays, two stages for Chinese folk-culture activities and two dining areas with Asian and Western food vendors are planned for the event.
Attendance at last year’s festival exceeded organizers’ expectations. On some weekend days, more than 10,000 mobbed the event — and many of them were trying to get the best photos they could.
Photographer Chase Jarvis once said, “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” Many of us aren’t armed with professional digital single lens reflex cameras with fancy (and expensive) interchangeable lenses. For many of us, our “best camera” and only camera is on our phone.
While capturing the nighttime beauty of an elaborate display like China Lights on your cellphone or tablet has its challenges, it’s doable — with a few tips.
First, let’s talk about what not to do.
Don’t use your flash. It doesn’t help. The flash will light up the displays and prevent true light from the lanterns from showing their beauty.
Don’t zoom. It lowers the quality of your images. Without getting too technical, there are two types of zoom. Optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom is what lenses do on digital single lens reflex cameras. Most mobile cameras offer only digital zoom, which just zooms in on, or crops, the image, and will reduce the quality significantly. Your best option is zooming with your feet — physically getting as close as you’re allowed. Now, what to do. Since a large portion of your image is dark, your camera thinks you need a lot of light. Just pointing and shooting might cause over exposure. So the lights will look way too bright and blown out.
To avoid this, simply press your finger down on the area you want the right exposure for — in this case, the lanterns or light display. By doing this, you’re telling your camera what to expose for.
For more control over the exposure, you can click and drag your finger up for more exposure (make the scene brighter) or drag your finger down for less exposure (make the scene darker). On an iPhone, you’ll drag a little sun icon up and down. Samsung and other android mobile cameras have similar settings.
There’s another option for even greater exposure control. By pressing down and holding for a few seconds on an area you want to expose, you’ll get an “AE/AF LOCK” icon at the top of the screen. This will not only lock your exposure, it will lock your focus as well. With the “AE/AF LOCK” on, no matter where you point your camera, the exposure and focus will stay locked until you’re ready to snap your photos. While it’s locked, you have the ability to adjust the exposure accordingly. It will stay locked on whatever exposure you wish to adjust it to.
There are more options for taking mobile phone photos, but this is a good starting point to experiment. Try a few of these tips before heading to the display with lights around your house to get a good feel for how they work.
Happy mobile shooting!