10 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT CHRISTMAS:
(1) The clothes: hats, scarves, jackets, capes, dresses, gloves
(2) Celebrating at church: My church does NOT disappoint when it comes to celebrating the JOY of JESUS.
(3) SONGS: I love to pay them on the piano, sing them loudly in the kitchen, and listen in the car
(4) Cookies: Because how do you not love cookies?
(5) Cocoa!!!!! Hot drinks are where it’s at.
(6) Old-fashioned Christmas movies like White Christmas and Holiday Inn
(7) Building gingerbread houses. I really probably mean “decorating” houses because building them is a totally pain in the you-know-where.
(8) Wrapping gifts. I actually really like this part, even though I don’t get super fancy and mostly just strive to cover the box!
(9) Christmas Break!!!! I can’t wait to get up in the morning, make tea, get dressed, and NOT get in the car to drive my kids to school!
(10) Crafts: I make so much stuff this time of year, from scrapbooks to felt ornaments.
Enough about me, read on for my story about my 2019 family holiday photos…
One year I made my family get photos taken by another photographer because I actually wanted to BE in them. My husband asked, “Can’t you just do it? Like with a timer?” While I am a wizard (I’ve also been called magical) with a camera, it’s not quite the same when I’m in front of the lens instead of behind it. It’s nearly impossible to get cooperative children, for example, and even harder to try and pose myself without seeing myself. So, I don’t usually take pictures with my family using a tripod and a camera.
But, this year I was testing my light and knew that my ONE opportunity to get pictures together would be if I set up that timer. And, more importantly, these pictures are important to my children so photographic perfection wasn’t necessary as much as spending this time together and printing those pictures afterwards. (PS: Just ordered all these as 4×6 prints from www.mpix.com <–the only site you should EVER use for printing photos!) I never intended to show these to anyone. Most of my pictures stay in my private collection anyway. But, I thought you might like to see that even my sessions with my own family don’t go smoothly or perfectly.
There’s a photobomb, closed eyes, and I get tackled at the end.
{Photographer’s Technical Note: My camera has a timer and a continuous timed shooting mode. For this quick little session I set the timer to take 10 pictures (the max), each 30 seconds apart, with a 10 second countdown to the first shot. I did this for each kid and probably should have shot 10 frames of myself solo too!}
This is just a reminder that no matter how goofy your family photo session goes, there’s always plenty of usable, fabulous pictures of your family loving each other.
Enjoy & Thanks for looking!
