Christmas Card 2013

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I had such a nice response to my Christmas card last year that I really was fretting over what to do this year.

2012

Plan A was to go down to our town square with all the Christmas lights up and try to capture a family photo with christmas light bokeh in the background. But the problem with that is when tiny lights are bunched up, it looks like giant wads of white when it blurs and blends together. The other option is to just open up the depth of field and just get everything, but there was constant traffic in the background of the shots.

After a hour or so, I decided it wasn't going to work and we came home to try plan B. There was no plan B. I attempted at trying to re-create a similar shot as last year, but I hated the idea of repeating what I already did. I packed up my camera and was going to call it a night, but it kept gnawing at me that I wasn't going to have a Christmas card this year. Then I remember seeing a picture of a father holding a 3 picture frame. And inside the frame were photos of his family all looking up at him all Brady Bunch style. I figured what the hell, i'll try to make something like that. 

I took some matting I had left over from my Architectual Salvaging project back in August and I took shots of everyone holding the matting around their head. Then I took a family photo of us holding a frame we have with our wedding photos. With the help of Adobe CS5, I cropped, copied, and pasted our heads in that frame and voila, our Christmas Card for 2013! 

2013

In hindsight, I wish I had us coming out of the matting in the portraits. Maybe a finger or a chin resting outside, giving it a more 3D look. My hair comes out and thought that was interesting. Also, perhaps I should have had us hold the large frame in front out of heads making the portraits our faces. And it might have been cute to mix heads and bodies. Overall I'm pleased with the final result but it comes with a few creative regrets.

All the shots were taken with my Nikkor 35mm 1.8 and had the flash bouncing off the ceiling. I love the light reflection on the top of the frame, it gave it spotlight look and it really highlighted the textured frame.