Personalising Your Christmas Cards

This post might well be a little late in the day for some, but us - well we are always a bit last minute when it comes to Christmas cards.

Having always wanted to make our own cards we decided that this year would be the one.  At first we were going to use an on-line printing server but because we are so last minute this just wasn't going to work.

I was inspoire by a handmade set of nativity models that are a little cartoon like in style and I thought these would make excellent subject for our Christmas cards.  I wanted a nice and simple card and envisioned a few photos of each model on a plain background, and this was the first mini challenge.

I was not about to setup the full studio to take photos of 3 inch models so I created a make-shift micro studio on the kitchen work top using some plain white card. For the lighting I used a couple of speed lights and mouted the camera on the tripod with a 75-300mm lense.  I used the lense at 300mm to give the photos a really close up feeling.

It took a few test shots to get the lighting and exposure just right but once that was done I rattled through 5 key shots very quickely.  This is not a project limited to people with professional cameras and fancing lighting kit.  Anyone can create great images to make brilliant Christmas cards, or birthday cards or cards for any occasion.  A simple point and shoot camera, one or two desk lamps, some white card and of course something to photograph is all you need to make this work.

Post processing was done first in Adobe Lightroom and then Photoshop CS4, nothing much other than colour and white balance adjustments and a bit of heal brush.  We used PhotoBox to get 10 of each photo printed at 5 x 3.75 inches (just about right for a A6 card) and awaited delivery.

The cards were delivered the next day and we then set about the task of creating the cards.  Nothing fancy here at all.  First I used a guilotine to cut our white A4 card in half, then folded each A5 piece to form the A6 sized card.  Then it was just a case of gluing the photo on to the front of each card.

So here are the very simple yet effective Christmas cards. One thing is for usre, whoever received them will know we have taken a little bit of time in making a gesture of good will at this joyous time of year.