Now that the holiday cards have finally all gone out (three weeks after Christmas), I thought I would share the effort involved to take this yearly picture.
The holiday picture is getting harder and harder to take each year. I have to find festive and comfortable outfits for the girls. I need to get myself presentable. I have to listen to Jeff complain, complain, AND complain about having to be in the holiday family picture. He thinks we should only feature the girls, but I have to remind him (again) that our mailing list includes people that only know who he is so it would be nice to associate him with the random kids in the photo. This year was especially hard because we didn’t have anyone around to take the picture so we had to go back and forth to set the camera on the timer. Oh, and did I forget to mention this took an hour and a half? Let’s just say there wasn’t any holiday cheer in the room at the end.
This is one of the first photos. Besides the glare on the right, not too bad, we thought we were close to “the picture”. For the first 10 pictures we could not get Moy Moy (Isabella) to turn her head. We could not see what she was looking at. It must have been something only her baby eyes could see.
We could only get Mimi to take the picture if we let her watch her YouTube videos on my iPhone. This is what we looked like in between photos when Jeff was setting up the camera timer. Of course Moy Moy is looking at the camera now!
This was our runner-up photo. Mimi’s smile was just terrible, but I was desperate. It had been about an hour and everyone was getting restless.
I finally gave up on having the Christmas tree in the picture. The glare was just annoying. I grabbed a Christmas wreath from the wall and held it in my hand and we sat on the couch for the picture. This picture isn’t bad but I thought we looked too serious.
This was our picture! It’s not perfect. The girls hands are blurry. I sometimes feel like there is no shutter speed fast enough to catch them still. Luckily I was able to hide most of the blurriness with wording on the card.
I hope you have better experiences with your holiday card photo. Happy belated 2011 Holidays!