Working in a profession where it is my business to produce interesting images, I decide some time ago that rather buy Christmas cards, I should produce my own and so for the last 4 years this is what I have done.
I have admit though that each year is always a struggle to try and come up with something different and I nearly always end up pulling together something at the eleventh hour.I would recommend avoiding my way of working and having 12 months ahead of us until Christmas 2013 it is worth planning well in advance as to what your image will be, if you also plan to produce your own card.
I thought I would however share the process that went into the creation of my card for this year.
I wanted to capture what I recalled from my childhood as Christmas being a magic time rather than the commercial malaise that this now seems to be, and really think candle light has that feel about it, so I found a suitable Christmas decoration that used candle light to illuminate it. I chose a tea light holder with a row of Christmas trees and I did a couple of test shots.
First using the complete holder to create a landscape image, but some how it didn't work it just didn't seem to capture the magic. So then I decided to choose just one section of the holder be going in really close using a macro lens but that equally did seem to quite do it either. So finally I went for this slightly larger section still with a macro lens with three trees which I thought worked well compositionally.
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| I had also considered using the back of the candle holder because it did give a very interesting image but some how a little too bland. |
The macro close up.
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| This was the composition I decided to go with. However I decided that the image that I chose was still a bit ordinary so then I did some changes to it in Capture One using selective colour. |
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Firstly just to to bring out the reds After increasing the saturation and tweeking the the hue of the red, I created a further layer and did the same with the yellow for the gold stars. I then did a final tidy up in Photoshop darkening down the background and then put the border and text on to the final image.  I hope that you find this useful and plan to create your own Christmas Card for next year. |