Family pictures: cheat to win

We always take our own family pictures. It used to be because I didn't want to pay a professional, and that frugality has morphed into a quest. It's a challenge: we can do this! If someone like my professional photographer sister ever takes my family picture, I adore the beautiful pictures, but it feels like a hollow victory (that was way too easy!) and a tiny bit dishonest to share it because it is not my work. I didn't struggle and labor to get this picture, so part of the excitement goes out of it. I LOVE Em's work and never pass up an opportunity for her to take our pictures, but I guess I am just a die hard do-it-yourself-er with my amateur photography. This year we tried a new two-part strategy for our family picture:

1. One-and-done: we promised the kids if they looked and smiled the first time that we would not take any more pictures, and they could have candy before lunch. The shocker was that it WORKED. We took exactly one picture for our Christmas cards. After church one Sunday in late November, I had everyone stand on the driveway. Jeff and I pulled an old table out of the garage, set the camera on it, turned on the timer, and sha-pow, family pictures were done.
2. Cheat to win: we have a 5 year old eBay DSLR camera whose features I have barely begun to learn after two years of experimentation. Thankfully its auto setting takes awesome pictures, so I usually default to that in a pinch such as driveway post-church photo shoots. My secret weapon is Adobe Lightroom. Every time I visit my professional photographer sister, I sit and watch her edit pictures in Lightroom and I pick up a few more tricks. I employed all of those tricks to get our family picture Christmas-card ready.

Here is the original image, from the auto setting on our camera:

The day was darker than I thought. Help, Lightroom!

An exposure increase here, a green decrease there, and hello, bright and happy family! I couldn't fix the slight fuzziness around our shadowed faces, but I thought it still worked great.

Now how about a close up? Same picture, cropped. 

 Or a vertical crop? Maybe black and white?

I took exactly one picture of just the kids together too. This is the dark original.

A few minor adjustments. I wished over and over that Rose's ponytail wasn't covering Jay's cheek, but I let it go. This picture is so THEM.

A crop job. A B&W experiment. 

The girls, enjoying their sugary treats afterwards. 

Confession: on Christmas Eve I took more than one picture of the kids. Surprise, surprise! In fact, I took about 100 over the course of ten minutes. They were extra wiggly/excited/uncooperative, so I defaulted to "snap as many as possible in a short time window and choose the best ones." That is my other strategy for photo-taking, only really helpful when I am holding the camera instead of setting the timer. I'll save those for a different post. I took two pictures of our family together on Christmas Eve Sunday after church...

Jeff helps me aim and focus the camera, then we add the kids in last minute. 

 Original: dark again!

 Amber was eating a cookie, but her face was pointing towards the camera so it counts as a win. Brrr, it was so frosty and COLD. It snowed that night.

Crop-a-doodle-doo 

One last picture, all for Jeff's Christmas socks. Original: dark again. I could attempt to fix that darkness by adjusting the ISO and maybe another setting too on the camera, but experience has taught me that messing with camera settings has the potential to create an un-fixable error, so in the interest of the "one-and-done" family photo policy, I stuck to auto. 

Favorite picture of my favorites. (I digitally removed the gold doorknob above Jeff's head and the toy by my hip, and also cropped out our garbage can). Amber was still eating her cookie and blinking, but again I let it slide. Sweet liberation!

Moral of the family photo story: cheat to win! 

Sugar and Lightroom.