Jess and I went to the Idaho Botanical Garden’s annual Winter Garden Aglow this past weekend. It’s always fun to see the lights. I’m glad we went when we did, because it has been raining all this week and there is nary a speck of snow left anywhere on the ground. I’m sorry, but viewing Christmas lights is something that simply MUST be done in the snow. It just makes them about 100x better.
This year, we seemed to be in attendance with a lot of really naughty little kids. Jess surmised that it had to do with the “perfect storm” of kid-dom. Christmas, night time, and snow.  Anyways, there were kids throwing snowballs. Kids running around off trail. Kids having uber-meltdowns. One boy, “Austin”, about 3 or 4 years old was with his mom and grandma. He was running around like a dog off leash. They were imploring him to come back and drink his cocoa but to that kid, they may as well have been speaking Chinese. Never slowed down. Never looked back. Never acknowledged they even existed. The only reason they caught him (as he was running off the trail) was that he got boxed in by plant/Christmas light displays. He was like a wild animal. Unreal.
Anyways, I did bring the camera to shoot some shots. I got a couple traditional shots of the lights. But, since I don’t have a mono-pod or anything to help stabilize night shooting, I decided to go another direction as well. Deliberately moving the camera with a slow shutter speed in order to “streak” the lights and create funky effects. I really like how some of these turned out. Notice that the LED lights actually flash really quickly, so they look like dotted lines when the camera is moved. Interesting. I present to you a selection of my Abstract Christmas. The whole album is available on Flickr.com as well.
As always, click each image to go to it’s Flickr page. Some of these images look much better when viewed full size, which you can do there…
And, a few of the more traditional shots I took…
Merry Christmas everyone!