Occasionally I do a bespoke Christmas Card. Something that is unique. Christmas 2018 was one such occasion.
It’s easy enough to send out the same old store bought cards each year but it takes a bit of planning and imagination to come up with something special. Something that features your family. Something that you can look back on with a fond memory and something that shows just how much your kids have changed and grown. So do you do group shot of the family? Let’s face it, whose family doesn’t enjoy receiving a lovely card with a shot taken only days ago?
Sometimes we want to be a little more adventurous. Leah asked me to come up with something featuring her two children that she could send out to family, both locally and overseas. To be honest I have always loved Christmas and the magic of kids when they still believe in Santa Claus so I set about trying to create an image that showed something of that magic. Lets face it, kids have great imaginations so I though it possible that kids could look up into the sky and see whatever they wanted in the clouds – that they could actually see Santa Claus formed from clouds and be interested, amazed, excited.
We went to Spencer Beach near Christchurch at around 8am in the morning a couple of weeks prior to Christmas and I shot a few frames of the overall beach scene and some closeups of the kids pointing into the sky. But kids are funny. They both started pointing in different directions and didn’t quite know what they were supposed to be pointing at or why. And you need to shoot pretty quickly because children get bored within a few minutes.
The final image was put together in photoshop from the original beach scene, a separate image of the kids sitting on a sand hill pointing and of course the image of Santa which I had to make look like a set of clouds. A bit of artwork for the message inside, some digital printing and presto, a unique Christmas card the family will absolutely love.