Now that the hustle and bustle of the holidays is over, I wanted to come back and give you all a wrap up of our holiday photo inspiration to reality project. We started this project back in November when I put together a holiday portrait inspiration board. I wandered through the visual confection that is pinterest and repinned images that caught my fancy. Then I added a few captions with practical comments on how the photo might inspire your own Christmas photos.
In early December I started thinking about what to wear for a holiday portrait session. I browsed my closet with my inspiration images in mind. I also braved the Christmas shopping crowds and headed out to some local clothing stores such as Kohls and TJ Max to find something sparkly & festive and something warm & fluffy. I grabbed a few different items so that I would have different options to try out on the day of the shoot with the plan to return whatever I didn’t end up using.
Today I thought I would share the results of our Inspiration to Reality Holiday Photo Project.
Inspiration To Reality : 01 – Vintage Sparkly Feminine Holiday Card
This is one of my favorite images from our Holiday Photo project and it’s the image that we used for Luck Photography’s 2011 Christmas Card.
Inspiration:
Reality:
You can find a “before and after” post of this particular image that shows what this image looked like unedited and how I turned this photograph into a vintagy feeling Christmas card.
Inspiration To Reality : 02 – Outdoorsy Couple In Love
I noticed a small trend among my inspiration photos of kissing couples outdoors wearing coats, hats and scarves. Make time to smooch my beloved somewhere pretty? Yes please!
Inspiration:
Reality:
I hoped for a few early snow flurries but none came along. We decided that our annual ‘perfect Christmas tree hunt’ would also be the perfect backdrop for a winter themed holiday portrait of us. I had a few cute hats and scarves all picked out. When our tree hunting Saturday arrived, we had a gorgeous sunny day with unseasonably warm temperatures. Like almost 70 degrees. We hardly needed a light sweater yet alone hats, scarves and winter jackets. We could have faked it and sweated in our hats and coats for the sake of the photo. Sometimes that’s just what you have to do, but we decided to be true to the day. We picked a spot sans scarves and hats, I tweaked all the camera settings, explained some of the vision for the photo and handed over our camera to a willing friend. This is the image we chose to use for our personal Holiday Greetings.
Inspiration To Reality : 03 – Child/Puppy Dog with Christmas Lights
Here at luck photography, we consider our puppy dog to be part of the family. So of course we wanted to incorporate him into our holiday photo project.
Inspiration:
Reality:
Our sweet puppy was a little perplexed by being wrapped in lights but patiently went along with our crazy idea. We are quite smitten with the results even if he isn’t.
(Sidenote: Safety first. Please make sure you always keep your children and pets safe. We made sure that one of us was inches away from the plug, that our puppy was not scared by the process and we knew that he was not the kind of dog who was likely try to chew on the cord.)