I love this time of year. The sights, sounds and smells of the seasons are so wonderful. It is a wonderful time of year to take photos. Christmas lights are perfect subjects. They don’t move, they they look incredible the longer you leave the shutter open and there are so many colors and possibilities. Shooting wide open also allows you to get some great bokeh too. There are so many options. Get out there and start shooting the lights.
Allison and I have lived in our home for quite a few years and every Christmas season I say that we should go to La Salette to look at the Christmas lights. La Salette is a shrine and they have this wonderful outdoor light display that starts on Thanksgiving and ends on Epiphany. This year we finally went. We bundled up Eva and took her to see all the lights. I took my camera and tripod to try some outdoor low light photos.
When I was very young I lived on the same street as the La Salette Shrine. I remember winters where I was watching the long line of cars go by the house on the nights when the lights were on. At that time there were no malls to speak of, no other entertainment really, so the place was always packed. It is funny remembering the place. I hadn’t been since High School. Your younger self remembers how big it was and your older self now sees that it wasn’t that big at all. You can walk around in an hour or so. I used to think that we were there forever, maybe because we were cold and there were so many people and we had to read all the signs. I am looking forward to Eva growing up and us having a tradition of going to La Salette for the lights and then dinner at Bliss Bros Dairy afterward.
Bliss Bros. Dairy was located diagonally across from our house and I always loved going there for ice cream. Tonight we started our tradition of going to La Salette and then to Bliss. Eva was, of course, a little charmer and she had little boys come up and wave to her. I am in for many sleepless nights as she gets older. I took a few photos of our walk around La Salette, they even added a carousel and fried dough. We didn’t get that but we did make sure we got hot chocolate and hot cider, not in the light up La Salette mug though. That was kind of tacky and I never ever, ever need a mug again in my life! We have way too many so note to all, no mugs, ever. Here are my photos tagged with La Salette on Flickr.