Category Archives: Christmas Lights

On Wednesday I tried to do some weird timelapse motion-blurred Christmas lights with my iPhone 13 Pro Max and was disappointed with the results because the “smart” phone kept trying to “fix” or “correct” what was obviously an error on my part in how I was using the camera and thus giving something that was weird and motion-blurred.

Who in their right mind would want that?!

I mentioned then that I had some still functional older iPhones that might not be so “smart” and in turn might simply record what I was pointing at when I opened the shutter. My old iPhone 6 plus not only has a headphone jack (more on that some other time) but sure enough, it’s old enough and “stupid” enough to not mess with my photographic tomfoolery!

The lights on the roses next to the driveway on the iPhone 6, compared to Wednesday’s iPhone 13:

And another:

Inducing a bit of wiggle in that 1/4 second exposure is tougher than it looks.

On the other hand, you can just swing the camera side to side as fast as you can while shooting pictures.

You can get up close.

You can step back and get a big chunk of the yard.

One very odd effect on some ornaments shows off the “rolling shutter” on the iPhone. (I think – Destin at Smarter Every Day might prove me wrong.) There aren’t four candy canes at each of those spots, just one.

A mix of the big bright lights with the tiny fairy lights.

A bit of wiggle, but I like the way the trails at the top & bottom aren’t parallel, but converging in an arc.

Again, take a look at the LED “icicle” lights hanging down. I think they show up with nine or ten images where the candy canes have four has to do with the frequency that the LEDs are firing, but that’s just a W.A.G. (Wild Ass Guess)

The biggest takeaway of the night might be more related to the neighborhood. A rental house across the street from us has come vacant and there were folks over there today, presumably looking at it as potential new neighbors. Now they’re seeing this lunatic running around our yard in the rain with an eight year old iPhone, waving his arms around like I was having a seizure or had a spider down the back of my shirt.

If they decide not to move in, I’ll understand.

The iPhone giveth and the iPhone taketh away!

With an older smart phone there wasn’t as much logic in the phone, not as much computational wizardry on call with every photo, so if, for example, you took a picture of Christmas lights at night and moved the phone during a longer exposure of several seconds, you could get some interesting light trails. If you wanted nice, pinpoint lights with perfect Normal Rockwell focus, you needed a tripod or a miracle.

Now, with the camera smarter than you are, if you wiggle during that five or ten second low light photograph, the camera will turn it into dozens of much shorter, sharper, in-focus pictures and then align the bits and integrate and stack it all, giving you pinpoint lights.

But if you should WANT to get blurs and trails and foggy focus and something that might be more fun, more different, more froo froo, more artsy fartsy? That’s a problem, since you’re not in control any more and you can’t override most of those settings. So it might take a dozen or two photos before you get anything like the effect you want.

It occurs to me that, while I love and use the crap out of my iPhone 13 Pro Max and am yet disappointed with this facet of its design, I do still have my iPhone 8 and my iPhone 6 which may not have SIM cards to turn them back into phones, but they’re still perfectly functional as cameras. Most importantly, stupider cameras. It might be necessary to pull them out and charge them up for some ‘sperimentin!

In addition, while the world may be moving toward little bots and devices with “FULL AUTO MODE!” everything, the DSLR world, while containing modes in which the smart camera does most of the work, still has “off” switches for almost every one of those modes. More ‘sperimentin!

For tonight, enjoy a couple of quick shots of the lights on the rose bushes next to the driveway.

Another busy day with the lights – probably at about 80% to 90% of what I would like to do at this point.

I’ve got three places where I would like to get a set of lights up, and another two or three spots where I can add another set to fill in, if I can find working sets of lights.

We’ll see. At this point part of the problem is that a lot of the light sets I have are years and years old and they’re starting to fail, with 1/3 or 2/3 or 1/4 of the sets being out. I won’t put those up, but I can’t quite figure out how to repair them, either.

There are little gizmos out there that are supposed to help you identify where in a light set it’s broken so that you can repair that part – I’ve never been able to get them to work. For now, if I can get a couple of sets, great. If not, well, at a certain point, good enough is good enough. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. It’s already better than I did last year, so a couple more quick sets and I’ll be fine if that’s all we get done this year.

Outside.

Then we have the inside decorations and the tree.

And the cards.

I do love the holiday traditions!

The Younger Daughter was nice enough to come over today, as she is wont to do on the Friday after Thanksgiving, to help with the first round of Christmas lights and we got a lot done.

We got probably half of them up – still need the lights over the garage, the icicle lights along the gutters, the lights along the driveway and in the rose bushes, the lights at the end of the house in the hibiscus bushes.

But, as always, a lot of the first day is also spent running extension cords and setting up timers, so all in all it was an excellent day.

And, as always, it was way too much lifting, twisting, carrying, climbing of ladders, and so on, so my stumpy, slightly chubby, desk-ridden, sendentary body is twitching and cramping tonight. Ah, the things we do for our art!