Shoot Your Own Christmas Card Portrait – Part 4

You’ve successfully turned your living room into a somewhat convincing Christmas-themed photo studio. Now comes the real fun – getting everyone in the family to pose decently and look at least somewhat happy about it – and framing it all up with the camera to get a great shot! What’s tricky about telling you how to do this is that every family is different, every setting is different and every camera is different; but I can give you some tips to help you guide your own artistic vision and gut feelings on posing and composing your Christmas card portrait.

Posing – Hopefully Without Starting a Family Feud…

You should already have a spot picked where you can pose your family several feet in the foreground of some interesting, festively decked out feature in the background of where you’ll be shooting the portrait for your photo Christmas card; now it’s time to get everyone as close to one another as possible without looking cramped. Warning! Some of this may bring back long-stowed memories of getting your class picture taken in grade school.

• Put the tallest people behind the shortest people – or – seated if you want them in front.
• Use either a nice, traditional chair or one that will disappear into the crowd if you want to have someone sit.
• A favorite group pose is to have the taller half of a couple sit on the chair and have the other stand behind.
• It’s okay to have bodies partially block other bodies – but don’t block faces!
• Position everyone so that their bodies are slightly turned toward the flash you placed between the camera and the background but their faces are toward the camera.
• Make sure everyone keeps their eyes opened and their heads up – but not unnaturally!
• If anyone is going to wear glasses in the shot, have them tip the lenses slightly downward and wear them a bit lower on their nose than they normally would to stop glare from the flashes.
• Dangling or stiff arms make it look like there should be mug shot measurements behind the person – try placing hands on shoulders, the back of a chair if there is one or having arms casually folded.
• Do whatever it takes to make everyone smile! Have someone make funny faces, tell jokes, whatever you need to do to break the monotony and make people look happy!

Composing – Your Camera can Shoot More than just Snapshots and Facebook Self-Portraits!

If you’re used to just looking through the back of the camera and shooting whatever is there as long as it’s there now’s the time to start thinking about what you’re shooting! By the time you’re done putting these tips to work for your Christmas card portrait even your snapshots will look better.

First Choose the Orientation of Your Camera

• If your family posed as a group is wider than taller, leave the camera in its horizontal orientation.
• If your family posed as a group is taller than wider, turn your camera vertically on the tripod.
• Should you have to do this when you are using a flashgun attached to the camera – and the flashgun allows for it – tilt and rotate its head so that the lens of the flash is pointing up at the ceiling. If you can’t do this, just make sure the flash lens is pointing at the family.

Next Fill the Frame Properly

• Use lens zoom on your camera, or move the tripod if you have to, so that the family fills about 70% of the middle of the viewfinder or screen on your camera.
• Doing this will leave the background in the remaining 15% of the frame above, below and to either side of your family. That should leave plenty of space so that body parts don’t come too close to the edge and allow enough room to play with for cropping to various standard print sizes.
• The portrait does not have to be full body-length, especially if there is not a big difference in height once everyone is standing and sitting and waist and lap height is fairly close on everyone.
• If you are shooting waist-up, you don’t have to leave as much space at the bottom of the shot.
• Never cut the extra space above heads too close. It’s better to leave more than not have enough.
• If you would have to cut anyone off too far below the waist shoot full body-length instead.
• If there are children standing or sitting on the floor with adults standing as well a full body-length shot is probably best.
• If the portrait is just you and your significant other a waist-up or even head and shoulders shot is a nice alternative to consider.
• If you are cutting arms off you need to recompose to add space for background to the left and right of the people.

Now Focus

• For simplicity’s sake if your camera has any kind of face-detection auto focus use it.
• If you don’t have that feature, but you can choose the area of the frame that the camera will auto focus on, choose the area that’s closest to the center of the group of faces.
• If you can’t do either, just use auto focus and check accuracy on the camera between shots.
• If you don’t have auto focus you’re either using a film camera with some vintage to it and have enough skills to use it that you’re laughing at these articles or you have a fixed focus camera and you’re going to get what you get out of it and that’s that!

Well, that’s about enough to bombard you with for now – but the good news is that we’re almost done! Next time we’ll wrap it up discussing how to magically shoot the photo you are appearing in (or conning you neighbor to come over and push the button) and making lighting and exposure adjustments on the fly.