Ten Days to Christmas: Peace

From “A Christmas Carol” (attributed to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) in Our Holidays in Poetry by Mildred P. Harrington:

Then peace was spread throughout the land;
The lion fed beside the lamb;
     And with the kid,
     To pastures led,
The spotted leopard fed
     In peace, in peace
     The calf and bear,
The wolf and lamb reposed together there.

As shepherds watched their flocks by night,
An angel brighter than the sun
     Appeared in air,
     And gently said,
“Fear not, be not afraid,
     Behold, behold,
     Beneath your eyes,
Earth has become a smiling Paradise.”

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Back by popular demand (!!), here is the first post in 2023’s “Ten Days to Christmas” series, a series that I started a few years ago — originally beginning two days too late to name it after the more well-known and traditional moniker “Twelve Days of Christmas.” I started it in 2019, as a way of learning more about photography, trying new setups and experiments as each year’s project progressed. For those unfamiliar (or those feeling nostalgic), here are links to posts with all the photos in the previous years’ series:

Christmas 2022
Christmas 2021
Christmas 2020
Christmas 2019

Christmas baubles, glittery whatnots, and holiday lights are great subjects for photography experiments, fun and suitably challenging. You can learn a lot about lighting, depth of field, color, and exposure; and — as you can see in the second trio of photographs below — sometimes you can just unfocus the camera and work with whatever you get!

Each year I add one or two items to my photography gear to help with this project. In 2020, for example, I bought an inexpensive boom to hold foil wrapping paper as backgrounds; and the next year, I bought studio lights and stands to hike up my glitter game. You can seem them both in use below, in a photo I took showing the process of taking photos, last year.

The completed images from this setup are at Six Days to Christmas: Angels and Nutcrackers and Wintry Blues — where the confusing mix of lights and cords and paper became something different entirely.

I’ve also been using star filters (sometimes called starburst or crosscut filters) occasionally, though there use is somewhat more limited than I had expected since lights only “burst” pleasantly when they’re in focus. And this year I acquired a Plamp — a rather clever gadget that you can use to suspend things in the air in front of Christmas trees, which I used in several of the photos below to give the impression (maybe) that the doves and angels are floating around on their own.

I have an assistant, also, one who follows me from room to room, picks up whatever I drop, and steps aside when I swear out loud about things that looked so much better in my head (as things often do!) than when I set them up and took the photos. Here he is earlier today, taking a break in his safe spot, right after I knocked over a light stand….

This year, I made a commitment to starting the project early — since I had most of my Christmas decorating done shortly after Thanksgiving — so that I wasn’t scrambling around every day for ten days taking photos, post-processing them, finding poems and quotes, and creating blog posts. Here’s how that worked out:

I took these photos today, found the poem today, and wrote this post today. So much for starting early….

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Thanks for taking a look!

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