OK, I know this is one of those things that are not easily accomplished unless probably some trickery is used. Taking a photo of a lighted Christmas Tree to get the nice glow of the lights along with the decorations requires using the light that the Christmas lights are putting out for the exposure. That is the easy part. Now let's put a human next to the tree. They are only a shadow with the available light from the tree so we add flash to the mix. The flash makes the human exposure good, but the tree lights are muted by the bright light.
Some of you have a trick or two up your sleeve I'm sure to get both the lights exposed and the human exposed together in a pleasing form. Bounce flash, softbox, composite picture using layers, a snoot on the flash...
TIA for any hints.
Well a lot depends on what you want the final shot to look like. Is there ambient light in the room, or are the tree-lights your sole source of light for these shots? That's a big consideration.
Turning off all the ambient light and doing tight shots of faces peeking out from, or through, the tree's branches with tree lights illuminating the face could be fun and interesting... Lots of ways you could take this, artistically.
But assuming what you want is a shot with a pleasing,
balanced overall exposure, and further assuming there is ambient light to work with, I'd say fill-flash via the
Flash Exposure Compensation function (not to be confused with plain vanilla Exposure Compensation) would be your best starting point. FEC is awesome. I'd dial in (-1.5) stops of FEC (my usual starting point for FEC when doing Fill Flash) and see what that gets you. Do that by pressing the Flash button on the camera body and turning the Sub-Command Wheel.
Some Dodging and Burning in post would be easy to do in just about any post-processing app and could be used to lighten the faces in the shot and/or tone down the exposure on the tree lights to add some drama. Snooting the flash would be another simple approach if you want to keep the flash exposure on the tree lights to a minimum while keeping faces well illuminated.