Do It Yourself Family Photo Shoot

Do It Yourself Family Photo Shoot



I love this time of year for several reasons. One of those reasons is receiving the photos and Christmas/Holiday greetings from my friends and family. I really like to respond in kind by creating a photo card with a picture of our little brood. Above is the one I did up last year using a card template by Holly Brook Jones over at Two Peas.

The difficult part comes when we go to take our family picture. The first year we had the kids, we did the smart thing and had a photographer take photos.

Honestly, though, the last couple of years have been very challenging, and booking a sitting with a photographer didn't happen. Time, money, and sheer exhaustion got in the way, so we chose to do it ourselves.

I don't think this way is the most optimal. I would always recommend having someone else take your pictures, but this can work in a pinch. And sometimes, around the holidays, we may need a quick, no-fuss method for getting things done.

Here are some tips that worked for us in our makeshift photo shoot:

1. Choose coordinating outfits for family members.
We always choose colors that go together well instead of trying to have everyone wear something that's identical. Last year, as you can see from the card above, everyone wore jean jackets with white tees underneath. The other two years, I've gone down to Old Navy and got everyone cute holiday shirts that had similar colors.

2. Do a practice run with some of the poses.
This worked especially well for us since we have young kids. Here is a picture of my hubby showing our youngest boy how he wanted him to pose:



3. Decide where you will take the pictures.
We have taken ours in or around our house because we are generally pressed for time. Outdoor photos are my preference, but this year, the weather didn't cooperate on the day we planned to take them. Instead, we used the place in our house with the best light. We chose our staircase because of the light, it kept the kids fairly contained and they couldn't get too rowdy. The previous year, we took them outside on our patio.

4. Use a tripod.
This idea is probably an obvious one, but it bears repeating.



My hubby set ours up and tweaked the camera settings so that it would take pictures automatically on continual burst (where the camera takes several pictures in a row until you tell it not to). This allowed him to hit the button on the camera, then run over really fast and jump in with the rest of us.

5. Take a lot of pictures!
If you have squirmy kids or family members that have trouble keeping eyes opened, tongues in mouths, and so on, a lot of pictures to choose from will save your bacon. Using digital cameras makes it easy to decide what pictures to keep or delete. It's perfectly OK to delete the ones you don't like or need.

And let me be perfectly honest here --- there were many, many shots that looked like this or some variation of it:



It makes me laugh now to look at it now, but at the time I was pretty frustrated. As we looked through the hot mess of crazy pictures, we did find some in the set that were good. Here is the one we chose for our holiday card:



6. Use photo editing software to hide any flaws in your picture.
My husband and I laugh when we see this picture, because our oldest son (in the light blue shirt) is leaning forward slightly. Trace says Elijah is doing his "on the potty" stance in this picture. If we had someone else take the picture, then they could've told Elijah to sit up straight, but that's how it goes. We did the best with the time we had. So instead, I will use Photoshop Elements and some cute digital goodies to hide our picture taking sins. I found a fun holiday card template made by Michelle Coleman to plop the photo into.

With a little photo editing magic and Michelle's template, here is the finished card:



The cute white paper strips, the red patterned paper on the left, and tinting the photo to a sephia tone all make the things that bugged me about this photo less noticeable (of course, now all of you will see my son doing that goofy sitting stance forever more). I'm actually quite happy with how this turned out, even if this wasn't our first choice for taking the photos. My husband and I agreed that even though our youngest has a cheesy grin, it's pretty cute and shows his personality at his age.

7. Once the group family pictures are done, take some of individual family members.
While you still have everyone there and dressed nice, take advantage of it and get some good shots of them. This is one of my favorite things about family picture taking time, because the kids really like the one on one picture taking. And, Trace and I also snapped pictures of each other, since we are always behind the camera. Here are some of my favorite individual photos:













I hope you find these ideas helpful. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject of photography or family pictures, but I do know how to make things works when I'm short on time and energy. :)

Enjoy taking your holiday pictures and enjoy the best of the season.

I'm Alive...

I'm Alive...

...and finally healthy! My hubby and I both got ill, so between that, all the Halloween festivities, and my husband's birthday, I had a lot going on. I'm back in business now and thought it was about time I did a page share:

Here are two pages I did last month for Heather T with her digital goodies she has available at Pixel Canvas.

This first one uses her "Masked 1" and "Country Dream" kits:




This second page was done primarily to showcase her "Paper Pieces 1: Houses" kit. I also grabbed some patterned paper from her "Burnished Papers" kit:



The next two pages are ones that I did when I participated in the Fall Crop at Two Peas (it was held at the beginning of October). Both of these were created for challenges I took part in, and the layout of Izzy and the dragonfly got me entered into a drawing, which I was lucky enough to win! I got a hefty box of uber-cool scrapping goodies for my efforts...woo hoo!





The following three layouts are ones I created as I took part in some of the Digital Weekly Challenges at 2Ps. I don't always have time to participate in these, but when I do, I feel like they help me grow as a scrapbooker. I enjoy the fact that I can hone my skills by the simple act of doing a page for a challenge.


This layout was a real catharsis for me. While the crux of the challenge for this page was to use a black and white color scheme with a color photo, it was great to actually address something through this page that has been bugging me for a long time. And ya'll know how much I like to be honest in my scrapping:




For this next layout, we were challenged to create a shadow for an object on our page, then warp it so that it actually looked like there was light somewhere casting a real shadow. I made a little shadow for my pumpkin and was quite happy with it:



The next challenge I did required creating a digital paper tear somewhere on my page. Can I just tell you how much I've always loved paper tearing? It's not really the "it" technique anymore, but I still try to sneak it into my pages here and there. I could've just grabbed one of the premade paper tears I already have in my stash, but I really wanted to try making my own. It took a bit of experimenting to find the right type of brush to use, but I finally got it right. I added a texture filter and burned the edges a bit, and I thought it turned out pretty darned good for my first ever shot at it:



Over at the 2Ps digi-board, some of the other gals and I finished another round of the digi-morph challenge, where we are sent a layout by another person in the rotation, and we scraplift the page to create our own. Throughout the process, we see only the page right before ours, and none others. When we all finish, then the challenge hosts reveal all the pages so we can see how the layouts have evolved. Here was my page for that challenge:



If you are interested in seeing the change from the first layout to the last, check out them here.

Now that I've reached the end of my post, I suppose you know what's coming! Here is October's Twelve of Twelve" page. Shhh...don't tell anyone I actually took the photos on the 13th, since the 12th was kind of an icky day...:D



Have a super day!