Christmas Tree Lighting In Truckee, California

Last night's Christmas Tree lighting in Downtown Truckee, California was a lot of fun. It has been a while since I'd been to a tree lighting. The main street in Downtown Truckee was shut down and there was a very large crowd of people. Lots of the shops were open late and treats were being given out to attendees.

The vibe felt like it was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Very warm smiles everywhere, and everyone was having a great time. Of course, I brought my camera and got a few photos of the tree right after it was lit up.

Shot with a Canon 5DS R and a 24-105mm lens. The ISO was 2500, the lens aperture was f/4.0, and it was a 1/30 of a second exposure. Shot handheld with no flash. Fortunately, the lens has nice image stabilization built into it so it was a sharp photo even though it was a somewhat longer exposure.

A lot of work was done to this image in Photoshop in order to get the most detail out of the shadow areas and sky. I also used Photoshop's newer AI noise reduction in order to get rid of most of the digital noise. The ISO 2500 setting can be very noisy with this camera the the AI noise reduction did an incredible job at cleaning up the noise. The image is not going up on my website, it probably would not look great when printed big. But I think it looks nice for blog posts and social media posts.

Truckee does a great job of decorating for the holidays. Here are a few more photos from previous years. I hope to get more similar images this year but I will have to wait until we get a decent amount of snow...