December Photography: Tips and Prompts to Close the Year

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December is the final chapter. The year is almost done, the days are at their shortest, and the world has wrapped itself in fairy lights and festive warmth. For photography, it is a month of genuine contrasts: the cold, dark outside versus the warmth and glow within. The bare, silent landscape versus the bustling, illuminated city. Those contrasts are exactly what make December one of the most interesting months to photograph. Here is what I have been exploring.

December Light — Making the Most of the Least

December light is the most challenging of the year. The winter solstice, around December 21st, marks the northern hemisphere’s minimum daylight. In London, sunrise is around 8am and sunset is around 3.50pm. In New York, it is about 7.15am to 4.30pm. That is a very short window.

But here is what I keep coming back to. That window, however brief, contains some of the most beautiful light of the entire year. The sun barely clears the horizon even at noon. Golden-hour quality light persists from sunrise to almost sunset. Every minute of December daylight has the warm, low, raking quality that photographers spend the rest of the year chasing during those brief twenty-minute windows.

The practical approach to December photography is the same as in November, but more focused. Be outside for every minute of good light. Do not waste the middle of the day, even at noon, the light is low and interesting. Treat the whole short day as usable.

Checking sunrise and sunset times weekly is particularly important in December as they shift day by day through the solstice. After the 21st, the days begin lengthening again, barely perceptibly at first, but it happens. That tiny return of light in late December has its own symbolic resonance that is worth photographing deliberately.

Time and Date’s sun calculator remains one of the most useful tools for planning around December’s brief daylight. Worth checking every few days through the month.

December Prompt One: Frost, Ice, and Winter Conditions

We introduced frost photography way back in January. December brings it back in full force, often with more dramatic conditions than early in the year. Proper hard frosts, ice on still water, snow in some locations, and December winter conditions create photographic subjects of extraordinary beauty.

Ice photography is one of December’s specific gifts. Still water ponds, puddles, and standing water in fields freeze overnight and create surfaces of remarkable visual complexity. The patterns that form in ice as it freezes are completely unique. Cracks, bubbles trapped beneath the surface, the crystalline structure of frost on top of ice, all of these reward the close, patient approach of macro photography.

Getting out early on a frosty December morning is genuinely one of the great photographic experiences of the year. The world is transformed. Familiar scenes become alien and beautiful. Spider webs that were invisible yesterday are outlined in frost crystals. Leaves that have been lying unremarkably for weeks suddenly have perfect white edging.

Snow, when it comes, changes everything almost instantly. The challenge of snow photography is exposure. Snow is very bright, and the camera’s metering system tries to make it grey by underexposing. Dialling in positive exposure compensation, typically plus one to plus one and a half stops, renders snow white rather than grey. The histogram is your guide: push the exposure until the snow tones are just short of clipping on the right.

Digital Photography School’s guide to snow photography covers exposure, white balance, and compositional approaches in detail.

December Prompt Two: Christmas Lights and Festive Illuminations

This is December’s most distinctive and most immediately rewarding photographic subject. Cities and towns are transformed by Christmas lights and decorations from late November through December. The visual richness of illuminated streets, decorated windows, and lit Christmas trees is one of the great annual opportunities for photography.

Night photography of Christmas lights requires understanding how to balance exposure between the bright lights and the surrounding darkness. The goal is usually to retain detail in the lit areas without letting them blow out, while keeping enough light in the surrounding areas to give context and depth.

Shooting at dusk rather than full dark gives a significant advantage. During the blue hour, the 20- to 30-minute window after sunset when the sky retains a deep blue tone, the ambient light in the sky balances more naturally with artificial Christmas lights. The blue of the sky contrasts beautifully with the warm orange and white of the lights. Full dark, by contrast, gives a flat black background with no depth.

A tripod is theoretically ideal for Christmas lights photography, but not always practical on busy streets. Modern cameras with good high-ISO performance can handle handheld night shooting reasonably well. Raising ISO to 1600 or 3200 and using image stabilisation allows shutter speeds fast enough to avoid blur while keeping the scene properly exposed.

Deliberately photographing lights slightly out of focus is a technique worth trying. Defocused lights create beautiful circular bokeh discs, the exact shape determined by the aperture blades in your lens. Switching to manual focus and defocusing slightly turns a row of lights into a field of glowing circles, abstract and beautiful.

Improve Photography’s Christmas lights guide covers both technical and creative approaches to festive light photography.

December Prompt Three: Interiors and Candlelight

December pushes photography indoors in a way no other month quite does. And indoor photography in December has its own magic: the warm glow of candles and fires, the decorated Christmas tree, and the atmosphere of domestic gatherings and quiet evenings.

Candlelight photography is one of those subjects that looks impossibly romantic and warm in the final image and requires some technical thought to achieve. Candle flames themselves are extremely bright relative to the scene they illuminate. Exposing for the candlelit faces and objects in the frame often causes the flames to blow out completely.

The solution is to shoot in RAW and bracket exposures, taking several shots at different exposure values and combining the best elements in editing. Alternatively, spot metering on the flame itself provides a starting point for adjusting the surrounding scene.

The colour of candlelight is very warm, with a colour temperature of around 1800-2000K. Setting white balance to daylight (5500K) rather than auto preserves the warm, golden cast, rather than correcting it away. The warm tones are the point. Keep them.

Fireplace photography follows similar principles. The variable, flickering nature of firelight means a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/60s or faster is needed to avoid blur from the movement of flames. A wider aperture lets in enough light to work with. ISO adjusted to compensate for low light as needed.

Tabletop Studio Photography Blog has useful posts on shooting in difficult indoor lighting conditions, including candlelight and mixed light sources.

December and Long Exposure Cityscapes

December’s early darkness transforms cities into photographic subjects of extraordinary richness. By 5 pm in most northern hemisphere cities, the streets are fully dark, and the city’s artificial light is at its most vivid. Combined with the Christmas decorations that are everywhere through December, the urban environment becomes almost overwhelmingly photogenic.

Long exposure cityscape photography involves finding elevated viewpoints, bridges, high buildings, car parks, hills overlooking cities and using long exposures to capture the accumulated light of the urban environment. Exposures of 10 to 30 seconds capture light trails from moving traffic, smooth out moving crowds into ghostly blurs, and accumulate the warm glow of city lighting into images of great richness.

The technical requirements are minimal. A tripod, a cable release or self-timer, a reasonably wide lens to take in the cityscape, and a patient approach to finding and refining compositions. The most important investment is time arriving before dark to scout compositions, staying through the blue hour and into full dark, and shooting enough variations to have genuinely strong options.

Reflections in rivers and harbours multiply the visual richness of December cityscapes. The lights of a city reflected in moving water, captured with a long exposure, create ribbons and pools of colour that are among the most beautiful images December produces.

Cityscape Photography Collective on 500px has thousands of December cityscape images that are excellent for studying compositional approaches and understanding what works in different urban environments.

December Wildlife — Finding Life in the Quiet Season

Wildlife photography in December is a different proposition from the busy months of spring and summer. Many species are far less active. Migratory birds have moved on. Insects are essentially gone. The natural world is in various states of dormancy.

But December has its own wildlife photographic rewards that are genuinely special. Wading birds and waterfowl gather in large numbers at estuaries and wetlands. Starling murmurations are the extraordinary aerial displays of thousands of starlings moving together before roosting for the winter months, and are one of the most spectacular natural phenomena you can photograph in the UK and parts of Europe.

Murmuration photography requires being at the right place at the right time, typically near a known roost site around dusk. The display lasts 20 to 40 minutes, and the light conditions during it are constantly changing. A telephoto lens of at least 200mm captures the flock’s form. Using continuous shooting mode at the fastest frame rate your camera offers gives the best chance of capturing the most dramatic moments of shape change.

Winter woodland birds, such as robins, bullfinches, long-tailed tits, and goldcrests, are more visible in December than at other times of year because the absence of leaves removes the cover they hide in. Garden bird photography from a window is one of December’s most accessible and rewarding projects. Setting up a feeding station near a good window and photographing through the glass with a telephoto is a technique that professional wildlife photographers use regularly.

RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch runs in late January, but December is the ideal time to set up and start practising. In the US, Project FeederWatch from the Cornell Lab runs through winter and is a wonderful community resource for observing and photographing garden birds.

December Project — A Year in Photographs

December is the natural moment for the project I mentioned briefly in November, creating a photographic retrospective of the year. Having kept a camera active throughout the year, you now have a body of work that tells the story of an entire year.

Selecting twelve images, one from each month, is the structured version of this project. The constraints force genuine critical evaluation. You cannot include everything you like from October. You have to choose one. That decision-making process teaches you to look at your own work honestly and to understand what your instincts consistently lead you towards.

Beyond the twelve-month selection, look for visual threads running through the year. Subjects you returned to repeatedly. Techniques you developed. Places that kept drawing you back. These threads reveal something about your photographic interests and instincts that is genuinely useful self-knowledge.

Sharing this year-in-review work is worth doing. A photo essay posted to a blog or photography community. A small printed book from Artifact Uprising or Blurb. A framed set of prints. These things honour the year’s work and give it a permanence that a folder of digital files lacks.

Blurb’s book-making platform is particularly accessible and produces beautiful results at a range of price points. Creating even a small photo book of the year’s best work is a genuinely satisfying way to close the photographic year.

Editing December — Warmth, Glow, and the Dark Aesthetic

December images occupy two distinct aesthetic territories, each requiring its own editing approach.

Outdoor December images, frost, bare trees, grey skies, winter landscapes often suit a cooler, more desaturated treatment. Pulling the white balance slightly cooler, reducing overall saturation slightly, and keeping shadows deep rather than lifted creates the austere, quiet beauty of the winter landscape. This is the opposite of the warm autumn treatment, and it suits the stripped-back quality of December outdoors.

Indoor and festive December images, Christmas lights, candlelight, fire, and decorated interiors suit exactly the opposite treatment. Warmth in the highlights, lifted shadows to preserve detail in dark corners, a slight haze or glow effect that enhances the soft, warm quality of artificial light. These images should feel warm and intimate in a way that coldly precise editing would destroy.

The ability to apply different editing treatments to different kinds of images, rather than using one look for everything, is a sign of genuine editorial maturity. December, more than any other month, demands this flexibility because the range of conditions and subjects is so wide.

Thomas Heaton’s YouTube channel covers landscape photography and editing with a warmth and honesty that is genuinely inspiring. His winter photography content, in particular, is worth watching through December for both technical guidance and creative inspiration.

Reflecting on the Year — What Photography Has Given You

Here is the section I have been wanting to write since January. Because if you have been following along with this series all year, picking up your camera in the frost of January, staying out for the June solstice, getting up for misty September mornings, working through the grey November days, something has happened to you photographically.

You see differently. That is what a year of consistent photography does. You notice light in ways you did not before. Look at a scene and instinctively consider how it would translate to an image. You find yourself reaching for the camera when something catches your eye rather than just walking past it.

That changed quality of attention is the real gift of photography. Not the images themselves, wonderful as they are. The seeing. The being present. The practice of paying genuine attention to the world around you.

The Photography and the Art of Seeing by Freeman Patterson is a book that explores this idea more fully than any other I have come across. It is not a technical manual. It is a meditation on what it means to really look. December is the perfect time to read it.

Wrapping Up December — and the Year

December closes the loop. The year that started with January frost and bare trees ends with December frost and bare trees. But you are not the same photographer who picked up the camera in January. The light you have chased, the skills you have built, the subjects you have found and fallen in love with, all of it has changed how you see.

Go out for the frost and the ice. Photograph the Christmas lights at dusk. Find a starling murmuration if you can. Make a photo book of the year. Print your best images and put them on a wall.

And then, as the days start imperceptibly lengthening after the solstice, start thinking about what January might offer. Because the year turns, the light comes back, and the whole extraordinary cycle begins again.

Happy shooting. And thank you for a whole year of looking.

What has been your photographic highlight of the year? Any subjects or skills that surprised you, or moments you will always remember? Share in the comments, it has been a wonderful year of exploring together.