Happy 2023-! Our tradition of a fun sparklers self-portrait continued on in this its 9th year as we rang in 2023-! This time we went for an Alien-esque theme with some fun early 2000s/ late 90s pop throwback vibes. While we did set off 3 of our own massive fireworks and shared sparklers with family members up in Michigan literally on New Year’s Eve, we weren’t able to capture our own 9th NYE Self-Portrait for a week & a half after New Year’s Eve due to immediately falling ill with an upper respiratory infection (needing antibiotics) from family members after that evening (though it was the 5th NYE of Jenny not drinking alcohol on NYE since she has no desire for any hangover ever). Thankfully post-antibiotics we’re all better and overall extremely thankful that we still always mask up while working for all clients (or even indoors at stores/ groceries) because that upper respiratory infection was BRUTAL (and almost spread to our ears).
In 2022 we were indeed still able to capture our 9th Annual Family Christmas self-portrait, but weren’t able to do so (between running our LLC business and caring for our 3 pets, 150 plants, & house) until the 1st half of December 2022. We rush captured our annual Family Christmas Portrait, then designed, printed, & sent out our annual 75 cards to family & friends across the nation. We didn’t upload these to social media at all in December on our work pages or personal pages as we wanted to make sure that the card receivers got the cards in the mail 1st and also because we were also fulfilling client holiday print orders all of December while also still heading out to photograph clients from a 3 hour round-trip away to a 20 minute round-trip away.
This year’s holiday card again included snow (locally by a body of water again in our exact same outfits) just as 5 snowy other Christmas family self-portraits of the past 9 have-! It was tricky trying to find a day that was snowy but not -10 degrees outside, but we made it happen very quickly before snow melted.
As a reminder, our 1st annual Holiday Card we created in our old home of Santa Barbara (on our favorite beach there- the image in the top right above) back in December 2014-! It was relatively warm that day and Jenny had bought a little thrifted Christmas tree, vintage silk ornaments, vintage massive human-sized nut cracker, santa hat, and sweatshirt specifically for the image. Since then Jenny has swapped hair colors and/ or worn fun, colorful wigs in the self-portraits that we create while Jason has always opted for his dog sweater & additional velcro beard for the images. We both always opt for our red & white striped skimmies on the bottom of our bodies (i.e. underwear & bathing suit bottom).
Sometimes amidst the chaos, travel, gathering of items, etc for these Christmas self-portraits you can see that due to the frigid cold (and battling other elements like rain, whipping winds, imminent sunsets, etc) we’ve messed up some of the elements in past years, but we always try to be in the same position and in the same clothing for ourselves-! If we were always including our pets in all of the years past, then our 2nd card would have immediately included our elderly cat Kevin who we adopted earlier that month in 2015 from the local rescue (St. Joe County Humane Society) and our 3rd card would have also included our doggo Coco who we adopted 4 months prior to that Christmas 2016 from another rescue (the Elkhart Country Humane Society). As you may be ale to see, our 4th card from 2017 included our little Marco bunny (who we adopted 8 months prior to that from Jenny’s Arizona sister/ parents) who was around 10 years old at the time (who later passed peacefully in our home in Summer 2018 of inoperable bony hip cancer). By our 6th card in 2019 our little 3.5 month young rescue dog Rizzo entered the literal picture as we’d adopted her a month earlier (from local Heartland Small Animal Rescue) right after photographing an 8 hour wedding that November 2019.
Anywho, Happy 2023 to all of our wonderful clients, friends, family, and fans of 14 years-! We and our 17+ year old Kevin the cat, 8+ year old Coco the dog, & 3+ year old Rizzo the dog hope you had peaceful holidays and miraculously avoided acquiring any illnesses from family gatherings-! May 2023 be less stressful than 2020-2022 were and may we all actively work to help others, set healthy boundaries, actively work on our health (mental included), and continue to evolve-!
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Coming up next week on our Weekly Wednesday blog we’ll be sharing either high end editing & composite work that we’ve done for clients in the past 14 years OR our past Notre Dame Basilica Weddings blog post (showcasing many clients’ beautiful weddings that we’ve photographed 7 minutes away at that epic venue/ Basilica). We have 8 blogs lined up for the next 2 months’ worth of Weekly Wednesday blog posts, so be ready for us to get back into the swing of things here on the blog-! We’ve still be photographing all of our clients weekly (pre & post 1st week of January illness) as well as shipping out client print orders on time, so things are still chugging along through winter over here at Jenny and Jason Photography, LLC. Whew-!