Family torture

Last week I decided it was TIME for family pictures. Amber’s face has unfurled enough and my body is somewhat more normal. I researched pose ideas for a family of 5 with a baby, we set up the tripod, arranged ourselves, and started clicking. Oh boy. Remember what I said about not needing photography skills to take a good picture? I think I said as long as you take enough pictures, one of them is bound to turn out, professional photographer or not. I hereby recant that statement. Three days of photo shoots and at least 200 pictures later, we finally got a few keepers.

The kids are more or less traumatized from the whole experience. Our three family photo sessions only lasted 10-20 minutes each, but to a 3 year old and 5 year old who are repeatedly being asked to smile smile smile cheeeese and look at a boring black camera, that may as well be an eternity. At one point Jay was laying on the floor crying. 

It was too cold and wet to take pictures outside with a tiny baby, so we had to figure out how to take a non-blurry picture inside with minimal lighting. That proved harder than it seemed at first. We finally had success when the sun emerged briefly on Saturday morning. We opened the blinds WIDE and finally took some clear pictures. With the help of a funny photo editing website I found (picmonkey.com), I managed to fix up a couple of our quick snapshots. And that’s how we do family pictures in this family. I say it every year, but…maybe next year we’ll get a professional to take them? HA!

There are way more of the hilarious failure-photos than the fancy kind. Personally I kind of like the crazies, but my inner historian also required at least one normal picture. Hence the three day group torture.

Day #1: The Christmas Tree
Problems: it was just too dark in there, so all the pictures were too grainy to print. And our pose was kind of boring.

The best two from this session, edited to compensate for the lack of light, and yet still too grainy:

  

Day #2: The Bed
Problems: we had light from two sources—the window and the ceiling light—and it messed with the colors too much for my limited editing resources to fix (neon orange hair). Plus our poses were awkwardly awful.

Possibly the most epic of all the failures: here’s the photo-inspiration and the reality. This makes me laugh so hard. Amber was passed out asleep and her head was flopping. We couldn’t figure out how to get Jay and Rose any higher/more visible, and their bones were gouging our backs, so our smiles were closer to grimaces. We switched poses pretty fast.

In all the ones we’re all smiling, someone’s head is inevitably cut off.

At this point we admitted defeat…

 

Ok, the two best from that session:

  

Day #3: The White Wall
Problems: the kids were DONE.

 

Two of the best three from this session:

I like these a lot (minus that pesky doorknob). I actually thought of this pose all by myself too. Take THAT, Pinterest!

 

WHEW! That was painful. The last good picture we took will appear on our Christmas card in your mailbox in about 2 weeks (if I have your address and if I’m really on top of things). I hope you can stand the suspense.