As many readers of this blog will know I do a personalised Christmas card every year I always try to push myself and do something different and it generally seems to work best for me creatively if I don't give myself too much time. However this year I did actually do a couple of shoots much earlier in the year with this years Christmas card in mind, both of these were possibly follow ons from the the series of Christmas 1950's pins up I did last year. Neither of these however really seemed to work when I came to reviewing them around November time to decide which I was going to run with.
So how did a end up with a cute hedgehog for my Christmas card if it wasn't planned ...... ?
The idea started after a shoot I did very recently with Zoo2U, who I am exclusively working with for some up and coming photography workshops or portraiture sessions. I had a great captured of Bramble a really cute Pygmy African Hedgehog and thought it would be fun to have a bit of play at making it look more like an ink drawing than a photograph:
 |
| Original Capture |
 |
| Edited Image |
I was trying to make things look a a lot more like a drawn illustration and through a couple of filters in Photoshop created this ink drawn look. It was about this time that a little red Santa hat started to come to mind conceptually, but I had no real idea of how to create this so I spoke to Chris Borrows a photographer and retoucher to see if he would have a go at producing this hat for me, which he did with a few variations as seen here :
I then put all of these options onto my Facebook page to get some consumer feedback on which people prefer. The large hat was much more favoured to the smaller ones positioned in different ways even though this had been my initial concept so i went with public opinion on this. The final stage was to add a little more colour to the hat as I felt that needed a bit presence to catch the eye.
The final result therefore being this image to go on the front of my card :
The original proof from the printers had text on the card fronts I had requested saying "Merry Christmas" but as I thought it was very clear what the picture was about, this was moved to the inside of the card.
And there you have it Marc Byram Photography 2014 Christmas Card ......... !!!
Thank you for following this blog and trust you continue to get some creative photography tips that you can also use for yourselves.
Merry Christmas and a Very Creative New Year.
Marc;-)