Holiday lights

Oliver Lara-Bennett, 1, plays with light-up snowmen and penguin figures in McAdenville on Tuesday December 4, 2012.

Holiday lights decorate Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, above and below, on Thursday December 6, 2012.

Merry Christmas!

I rode around all over Gaston County photographing the best-decorated houses in town for the Christmas eve edition of The Gazette. I got some good tips and was able to find some truly impressive light displays.

Check out the photo gallery

Polaroid New Years

With no ill New Years Eve party to go to, I decided to make my own--with my Polaroid!

...and my Christmas tree.

I recently acquired a Polaroid Countdown M80 land camera, and it's popped the cork on all sorts of vintage instant print fun. A precission instrument it is not, but with a little imagination, serendipity and Polaroid magic cool things can happen.

Exposure control is limited to a little 'lighter / darker' dial on the lens, but in low light (a room with only a Cristmas tree on qualifies) the shutter speeds get pretty long.

And because this is a pack film camera where you pull out the film manually -- as opposed to the 600 type of Polaroid that growls and spits the thing out automatically -- you can easily do multiple exposures.

You can keep cocking the shutter and firing frames off to your heart's content before yanking the tab--how cool is that! You just keep cocking the shutter and firing away until you see fit to yank the tab and see what you got.

In all the excitement I kind of lost track of excttly how many exposures I made on each frame. I'd say some of these pics might have as many as 10-20 exposures. I turned out the lights and made exposures of my Christmas tree with a variety of techniques.

For some exposures I held the camera steady, for others I swirled it, twirled it, and swung it to make light trails. For some I held the camera right in front of a bulb and pulled it away quickly with the shutter open.

Some shots were in sharp focus while others were thrown completely out to get some nice big colorful blobs (bokeh if you're one of those people that uses the term).

I did some pictures with my 'real' camera too, but you can't get pictures like this with a digital camera. Sure, you can use Photoshop to make a composite from multiple exposures, but without the serendipitous magic of the instant print it just wouldn't be the same.

So long story short; I stayed up way past my bedtime playing around with this fun stuff on new years. Hope you like it!

If you like this, you might also enjoy this post and this post.

See more cool stuff on my Flickr.

Merry Christmas!

McAdenville, NC (aka Christmastown USA) puts on a grand show of lights and decorations each year that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the tiny town. These are a few photos I shot in McAdenville on December 21.