Happy Holidays to those celebrating Chanukah this week!! Whew! Sorry we didn’t catch you last week as we were busy! Everything’s been going out to clients including their ordered last minute Gift Cards for Jenny and Jason Photography being filled having headed out to the post office at least 4 times within the past week and hand delivering many other packages!
This week we’d like to share a Family Christmas Portrait that we captured for Jenny’s parents/ family (us included in there!) over the summer, then Photoshopped 3 of the 5 pets in to (since our dogs were actually there on the boat with all of us)! Capturing this image was kind of a nightmare because we had to keep the tripod on a lake pier, tie the boat in 3 places to try to keep it still while it sat on the water, and the SUN WAS SETTING as the baby cried, the dogs barked a bit, and as the camera battery died and we had to pull ourselves to shore to replace a battery and re-try to photograph it on one of the last days Jenny’s sister and her family were in town visiting Jenny’s parents and us! Whew! **We did also Photoshop out all of the crazy Nascar decals that the fancy boat has on it because we’re NOT a Nascar family, but do like the boat. (I believe the boat is decorated for Dale Earnhardt Jr.?) Anywho here’s the card we designed for them and the photo we captured, styled, and fully edited:
Below shows a little of the start to finish process of removing, then adding, and then further removing of elements from the final photo.
The first is the original image as shot, second is the additional of 3 more pets and some postproduction, and finally the removal of most of the decals since none of us are NASCAR fans.
We designed the cards & printed them for Jenny’s parents earlier in December/ late November, but this year they didn’t send us their extra cards for us to send out, so if you haven’t gotten the full card, we’re sorry! We JUST captured OUR Christmas card TODAY because we’ve been waiting a FULL MONTH FOR SNOW to fall here and we haven’t even had ONE day of snow this December until a tiny bit today (that didn’t even seem to stick to the grass)! With it being just 8 or 9 days until Christmas, we HAD to finally photograph our Christmas/ New Year’s family photo TODAY and are stressed about speed double-sided printing them tomorrow and Friday, re-checking addresses with everyone (since those in their early 30s OFTEN move annually or at least often), printing out the addresses on the address stickers, and sending these within the next day or two by Friday evening (ONE week before Christmas)! We’re hoping to get everything out by Friday in the hopes of folks getting them by Christmas, but we’ll see! The lack of snow really fudged up our plans completely this year (Global Warming gets worse EVERY year as evidenced by the past 7 Decembers here). We’ve only had ONE other year that it didn’t even snow once in December, so we were really holding out for SNOW!
We hope that you’re in the holiday spirit and have gotten your immediate families some heartfelt gifts from SMALL businesses this year (we sent ours out to our immediate families on the West Coast a couple days ago on Monday in flat rate boxes) and that you have good SOLO plans for Christmas this year to stay SAFE next week! Jenny’s relatives who gathered here in South Bend had 17 out of 18 (or maybe even all 18 out of 18) get Covid-19 from their Thanksgiving festivities that we usually attend (but we didn’t go this year due to the worldwide Pandemic hitting the hardest it has all year here in the Midwest/ USA), so we hope that you take this REALITY into account when we get to Christmas next week and as Hanukkah & Kwanzaa are celebrated-!! MANY of us have been GOOD and quarantined at home for 9 months when not medically masked up in N95s out in the world, so we would appreciate it if folks would stop being irresponsible and PLEASE for the love of all that is sacred PLEASE NOT gather this Christmas and spread it to another 2 to 7 to 11 households-! Selfishness is not welcome here especially in our country SO HARD HIT by the Pandemic because folks won’t SIMPLY mask up, distance, and wait until HOSPITALS AREN’T SO BOMBARDED! Please. Do the right thing. For once we need folks to do the right thing.
>>>ANYWHO Check back next Weekly Wednesday for a Night Before Christmas Eve upload of our OFFICIAL 7th Christmas Card-! It was hell to capture today and we spent the entire day working, but we do it for those who say that they look forward to it every year! If it makes someone happy it’s worth the work that goes in to it! Happy Holidays to those celebrating Chanukah this week by the day!