Halloween is behind us, and you know what that means: The holiday season has descended. This time of year is a photographer's dream come true: Between now and January, it seems that every few weeks we have a new reason to put lighted decorations outside the house. In the past I've given you some general advice for taking holiday photos, but this year I thought it would be fun to take an in-depth look at the best ways to take photos of those holiday lights. You can use these tips over and over again this fall, whether you're shooting Halloween, Chanukah, Christmas, or New Year's events.

Preparing Your Camera

When you head out to shoot some holiday lights, be sure to make sure your camera is ready. You can get good results with almost any sort of camera--you don't need a digital SLR--but I do recommend using a tripod. Nighttime exposures are always somewhat slow, and it's just not possible to freeze the action when the shutter is open for a whole second.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus. For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from July, August, and September.

More About F-Stops and Polarizers

In the September Digital Focus FAQ, I answered a question about whether using a polarizer affects a camera's depth of field. (To learn how to intentionally tweak depth of field, read "Four Ways to Get Stunning Depth of Field.")

Everyone loves photos with a sharply defined subject and a blurry, indistinct background. This powerful photographic effect has been used for ages--and it's shallow depth of field at work. Not sure what depth of field is all about? Check out "Master Your Camera's Depth of Field." This week, I've rounded up four ways for you to take control of the depth of field in your photos.

1. The Natural Way: Aperture Control

You probably already know that your camera controls exposure by balancing aperture size and shutter speed. You can combine a faster shutter speed with a bigger aperture, or a slower shutter with a smaller aperture. There's no single correct exposure setting for any photo; there are many, as long as you keep those two values in balance.

Photographers spend a lot of time fussing with backgrounds. One of the first photo editing tricks you learn, in fact, is how to erase distracting elements in the background using the Clone tool, which is a powerful way to selectively replace one part of a photo with a different region. But what if you need to eliminate a big swath of background or actually make the background wider to accommodate a particular frame? The Clone tool won't generally work for situations like this, but I've got a better approach.

Why Cloning Won't Work

Reader Elizabeth Conneley wrote to me with this problem: "I have a photo that I want to incorporate into a montage and I need the photo to be wider than it currently is. I can't crop because I don't want to lose the top and bottom of the scene. I tried cloning the background, but it comes out kind of splotchy."

In a lot of ways, megapixels aren't that important. You'll never be able to detect the difference between an 8-megapixel and a 12-megapixel photo when looking at the picture on a computer screen, for example, because your monitor only shows about 1 or 2 megapixels of information anyway. So unless you're making poster-sized prints or doing a lot of deep zooming and cropping, who cares how many pixels there are?

The Value of Pixels

If you take a high-resolution photo, there's a lot of detail locked away in your image. You can zoom in and get a good look at minutiae in the background, for example. It's fun to see how much you can enlarge the image and still see somewhat sharp, meaningful visuals that you never noticed when you took the photo to begin with.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus. For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from June, July, and August.

Photographing Photographs

I am currently working on a family tree for our family. I have access to many old photos, but I won't have an opportunity to actually scan them with a scanner. I'm wondering how I might be able to use one of my cameras to quickly take photos of their photographs.
--Joanne Nelson, Florence, Colorado

Panoramas have been around for at least a century. In the old days, though, you had to combine a series of photos using scissors, tape, and elbow grease. These days, smart software seamlessly integrates your photos with little or no effort on your part. In the past, I've told you the best ways to shoot a panoramic series of photos. This time around, I've got some recommendations for a few programs that will take your photos and stitch them together for free.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is my all-around favorite stitching program because not only does it do a superb job of making panoramas, but it's also a pretty good photo organizer, as well. I use Photo Gallery to manage my personal photo collection, and when I take a series of photo for conversion to a panorama, making that panorama is as easy as selecting the photos and then choosing from the Make menu. You don't have to fiddle with any settings, and the program creates a high quality, full-resolution panorama that you can save or share.

No matter what the medium, artists love to tinker with the "long fade." Musicians sometimes fade songs to a whisper rather than resolve the song on a beat. In Westerns, the cowboy rides off into the sunset while the film fades to black and the credits start to roll. And in photography, you'll often find photos that fade to black as well. This variation of the traditional vignette effect is popular in portraits and wedding photos. This week, let's see how to add it to your own photos.

The Heart of the Fade: Masks

Since this effect is often used for wedding photos and other portraits, I'll show you how to do this with a photo of my sister from her wedding.

Once upon a time, being "into photography" pretty much just meant taking pictures with your camera, dropping off the film, and getting back finished prints. Few people had their own darkroom. These days--because your computer is the darkroom--you can process your photos yourself. And you don't necessarily need to pay for expensive image editing software: Recently I told you about Web-based photo editing programs; this week, I thought it would be fun to look at some Web sites and downloadable apps that take your photos to the next level, thanks to all manner of effects and editing goodies.

Make a Magazine Cover

FlauntR lets you open photos from your computer or from common photo sharing sites--like Picasa, Flickr, and elsewhere--and perform a slew of clever photo editing tricks.

When I took an art appreciation class in college, my professor explained the rise of abstract art movements in the 19th and 20th centuries by saying that since photography allowed artists to capture a perfect replica of reality, the only way for painters to remain relevant was to explore nonliteral interpretations of their subjects. Perhaps that also explains why digital photographers continue to create images that take license with reality. A while ago, for example, I talked about one way to make a photo look like it was a miniature. This week I'll tell you about a program I found that makes the process easier.

What Is Tilt-Shift?

This faux-miniature style of photography has become quite popular, and I continue to be fascinated by it. Among photography geeks, it's known as tilt-shift photography, because it relies on a special articulating kind of lens (called a tilt-shift lens, naturally) to create photos in which the depth of focus falls in an unexpected way.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus. For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from May, June, and July.

Palm Pre vs. Apple iPhone

So, which has the better camera?
--Gloria Askin, Denver

In the past, I've written about action photography in general and even how to capture water balloons as they're being popped. If freezing a moment in time is the ultimate goal of photography, then stopping a high-speed airplane as it zooms past at hundreds of miles an hour is surely one of the most exciting ways to use your digital camera. And this is the season for it: Summer is chock full of airshows at municipal airports and military bases across the country.

This week I've gathered up a summer's worth of photographs I've taken at airshows and put the best of them into a slide show. Head over to "What You Need to Know to Photograph an Airshow" to learn how to capture aerial acrobatics on your own.