Christmas Photo Adventure

Although I have yet to actually start making our Christmas cards, over the weekend we did actually manage to get our family Christmas photo taken. Let me just say that this was a bit of an adventure. A couple of times in the past we've had a friend come over to push the shutter release button for us because it's so hard to get the dogs to look at the camera when there's no one behind it. I think in the future we'll have to plan ahead a little more and hire someone to come over and help us, because Sunday's photo shoot was a bit of a disaster--albeit a hysterical one.

With the help of a remote and a tripod, I took 101 total pictures, starting with a few just of Chad where I was trying to get the exposure right using just the light from our window. Once we got the dogs (sort of) placed I just started holding down the remote button, instructing Chad to just keep smiling and hoping that eventually all of the dogs would at some point look at the camera. Although I never actually captured them looking at the exact same time, there were a few decent pics of each of them in the batch, so I was able to use Photoshop to edit together different dog heads/bodies/eyeballs to fabricate one coherent and acceptable picture. This is the final product with sort of an "antiqued" finish.


Overall I'm fairly happy with what I came up with, and I appreciate the end result even more because of what we went through to get it. It's pretty darn hysterical. Enjoy!!