bokeh

Most guides to photographing illumination were written for the northern hemisphere, where the festive season falls in the depths of winter and darkness arrives by four in the afternoon. South Africa inverts all of it. Our festive lights go up in November and burn through a high-summer December, which means waiting out a long warm evening before there is enough darkness to shoot in — sunset lands somewhere between seven and eight depending on where in the country you are, and you want another forty-five minutes on top of that before the lights read properly against the sky. The air is warm, the evenings are long, and the shooting window is narrower than you would expect. This guide covers where festive lights photograph well, the settings that get you there, and the creative techniques worth trying once the basics are working.

Where festive lights photograph well: four scenes

Illumination rewards matching your approach to the setting. Four situations cover most of what you will encounter,

South African light is not gentle. On the Highveld the sun climbs high and hard from a thin atmosphere more than 1,400 metres above sea level, while the Cape can hand you a week of flat winter overcast, and the KwaZulu-Natal coast softens everything through a standing haze of humidity. Portrait photography here is less about finding an interesting face than about learning to read the light falling on it. This guide works through the fundamentals — lens choice, exposure, portrait composition and how to shape light — against the conditions you will actually be shooting in.

What is portrait photography?

TAMRON 70-180mm F2.8 G2 (Model A065) Focal Length: 180mm　Exposure: F2.8　Shutter Speed: 1/30sec　ISO: 800

In photographic terms, a portrait is simply an image in which a person is the subject. The word carries a certain formality in English — it suggests a studio, a commissioned sitting, a framed print on a wall — and that formality is misleading. A photograph of your sister on the stoep

A macro lens is built for one thing and quietly good at several others. The name describes what it does at its closest focusing distance — render a small subject at life size on the sensor — but it says nothing about the rest of its range, where it behaves like a very sharp short telephoto. That makes a macro lens for landscape photography a far more sensible proposition than most people assume. This article covers both halves: how to shoot landscapes with a macro lens, and how to use one to produce the circular highlights known as bokeh balls.

Why a macro lens for landscape photography works

Macro lenses are usually primes, and they focus far closer than an ordinary lens of the same focal length. That is the whole point of them: a lens that will fill the frame with the stamens of a protea, the compound eye of a dragonfly, or the surface tension holding a drop of water on a blade of grass. Detail the eye cannot resolve unaided becomes the subject.

What gets overlooked is that the lens does