Creative Photo Christmas Cards
by Frank Logue
Most photo labs offer inexpensive imprints and envelopes to turn your favorite photographs into a Christmas card. With a little creativity and work, you can use your lab’s service to create photographs that will stand out from the crowd. Your Christmas cards will be passed around and talked about for years to come.
My wife, Victoria, and I have been doing photo
Christmas cards for a number of years. When we took the pictures for the
first Christmas card, we wanted a picture that would show the two of us
and we wanted the card to have impact. By moving the camera in close and
cropping tightly on the two of us and our Christmas signs, we were able
to get a lot of visual impact without much effort. I took the pictures
myself by setting the timer with the camera on a tripod. I would run around
and jump in the picture just in time. I was surprised by how many of the
pictures worked out considering how tight they were cropped. The first
year’s results were pleasing and for several years we continued to take
similar photos for Christmas cards. We didn’t use the signs again, but
we didn’t try to do anything more than just to get a good picture of ourselves.
A couple of years ago, Victoria got the idea that our Christmas cards could contain illustrations about what is going on in our lives at the time. It would be a visual version of a more traditional Christmas letter. We decided that we would need to stick to one or two big stories of the year if we wanted the people receiving the cards to get the message.
The first year our message was obvious, the main story was that Victoria was eight-months pregnant. The only sub-point that we wanted to work in was that we were living in the Washington, D.C., area. In order to illustrate our point, Victoria dressed up in a red union suit to show off the rubenesque curve that pregnancy was adding to her normally slim waist. I dressed in a complementary Christmas outfit and we headed off to the Marine Corps Memorial, which overlooks the Mall in D.C. from Arlington, Virginia. Our message came through loud and clear, and the card was immensely popular with our friends and family.
The challenge was then to follow up the next year with an even better photo. When the next year rolled around, we wanted to show how our 11 month old daughter, Griffin, was changing our lives. We decided on an illustration showing how she was taking control of us. From our brainstorming session, we settled on the idea of the two of us being trapped in a TV set with Griffin working the remote control.
We began by shooting a video clip
of Victoria and me with our faces pressed against a window of our house.
When we played the tape on the TV and freezed the image on the screen,
we appeared to be trapped in the set. To complete the illustration, we
put a festively attired Griffin in front of the TV with a remote control
in her hand. We had put her in control of our lives in the photo as much
as she had taken control in the previous year. We tried several different
exposures, but settled on one where the image on the TV screen was slightly
lighter than the rest of the shot. The photos where the exposure was balanced,
looked more like it was obtained by darkroom tricks, than by photographing
a couple trapped in a TV. Once again the card was fun to make and a big
success with family and friends.
I’ve given you these two examples to show the thought process that went into our cards. We create our Christmas cards with a simple three-step process: 1) We start with a concept to illustrate. In figure 2, the concept was simply Victoria’s pregnancy. In figure 3, it was Griffin’s taking control of our lives. Look for something that is a significant event or theme in your life. 2) Next, we brainstorm ways to illustrate the event or theme we selected. We usually come up with more than one idea for the illustration, but we haven’t yet had to resort to plan B. The last step is actually photographing the card. Allow yourself plenty of time, particularly if you will be photographing yourself using a timer, as we do. The idea is to have fun with this, so that the fun will come through in the pictures you send out. We now have people asking us at Thanksgiving when we are going to get our Christmas cards out. With a little creativity and work, you to can create a family tradition--Christmas cards that people look for in the mail.
~Copyright 1992 Frank Logue
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