The Christmas Picture

One of my 2010 resolutions is to write more posts to this blog than in the past. It seems as if I'm always thinking of things to write, but that I always happen to find things that take priority. Let's see if I do better this year, even if my first few posts are very brief and likely contain lots of typos.

Here is our 2009 Christmas card. I really like how it turned out and we have received many compliments, mostly from people who remarked on how lucky we were to catch all three kids just at the right moment. Well, anyone who may recall my post from Christmas 2007 with the photo montage set to music and titled "Herding Cats" you will know that there was more than pure luck going on here.

Indeed, and many thanks to my good friend & photographer Wen Peng, for her good work in snapping nearly 500 photos in early December. But alas, there was not a single image where all three kids were looking good. We were confronted with the prospect of going back to the drawing board, which, with Christmas rapidly closing in, was daunting.

So I started tinkering with photoshopping. And I use that as a generic since I don't have Adobe's PhotoShop. I use Microsoft Digital Image 10, but you get the idea. The above is the result of combining three different images. Here they are. I think they are mostly self-explanatory. I took Grace from the first "Image 1" , Luke from the second "Image 2" and Claire from the last "Image 3".

The first two were the most exacting because I had to match up the backgrounds and the images weren't taken in *exactly* the same place (note to self: request photographer use a tripod next time). In the end, I was able to take the left third of Image 2 and overlay it on Image 1. I had to take care to resize Image 2 ever so slightly so it matched Image 1. then position it so both the tree and the red sheet matched up.

Claire actually looked pretty good in Image 2, but we liked her better in Image 3, so I took advantage of the red sheet by cutting her out wide and using the width to cover her

in Image 1. Because the shade of the red was a bit different due to lighting, I needed to blend in the seam all around.

I think it worked out pretty well but hope that next year all three kids will be old enough to be bribed.