The lights of a Christmas tree always bring a beautiful ambience to the special time of celebrating the Gift of God, the Light of the world. Having seen a post on setting up a unique portrait, I implemented a few of the suggestions to add a little more magic to this shot of my granddaughters. By placing my cell phone (with video) playing, two things were accomplished: 1) glowing light emanating from the book and 2) the video maintained the focus of the kids on the book.
My wife prefers non-blinking, white lights and that has been standard on our trees since marriage. However, my daughter’s tree had LED lights that changed from white to colors and blinked every 3-5 seconds in the various transitions. The sight brought back a forgotten childhood memory of laying on my back and watching the changing colored shadows that the blinking lights on the tree created on the ceiling of our living room. To me, it was the ambience that bred a sense of anticipation, excitement and joy.
This post is in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Ambience
Rural Iowa Pastor 
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Thanks for the ping back, Chris.
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What a beautiful capture! Love the lighting, colors, shadow, and the beautiful expressions of the children. 🙂
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Thanks, Amy. As mentioned I was following some directions from a blog post I saw before Christmas. While the author had a lot of post-production Photoshop additions, I preferred to keep it simple and hopefully capture the magic of the moment.
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You did capture the magic of the moment! Thank you for sharing, Chuck!
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Chuck, I love what you did here. You captured the magic of Christmas in this one shot. Wonderful! Would you mind sharing the link for the post you mention?
We have small, blue, non-blinking lights on our tree by my husband’s request. The girls and I love them, too, so no issues. I just got all the decorations put away today, a bittersweet moment. It takes a few days to adjust to the lack of decorations, but it looks good this way, too.
janet
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Thanks, Janet! I’m glad to supply the link. While this website is heavy in selling presets for Lightroom, I find some tips and techniques that I occasionally use. While the set up for the shot was instructive, I ignored the post-production directions because I tend to steer away from “glitter.” http://www.colesclassroom.com/create-christmas-magic-book-photo-step-step-guide/?utm_campaign=free-blog-posts&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email-broadcast&utm_content=xmas-book&utm_term=existing-list
The house looks a little barren for a while after the decorations go down. Because my wife was sick from the end of October and only getting better by Christmas, we did not even decorate since we were traveling to be with our kids for Christmas. Less to put away!
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Thanks, Chuck. I’m glad to read that your wife is better and I understand about the lack of decorations and the travel.
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This is beautiful.
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Thank you, Miriam! It was a fun experiment and my grandchildren were surprisingly compliant and humored their “Papa.” The video in the book did the trick.
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Truly beautiful photo and nothing beats the warm fuzzy ambiance of twinkling coloured lights at Christmas 🙂
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