dianaschnuth

Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet and I’m already thinking about Christmas. Our annual family self-portrait, anyway.

It’s fun for me, yet it’s also a source of stress. Every year I want it to look perfect, and I plan for weeks to figure out the right seating, posing, lighting, framing. Inevitably, even with all that planning, something goes awry. Even so, just the fact that it’s a family self-portrait in our own home makes it that much more perfect: a slice of life.

Last year’s portrait session involved a tantruming toddler and a grumpy Daddy. I had to merge two versions of the portrait in Photoshop to get the end result (which still wasn’t awesome, for various reasons).

The year before (shown above) was one of the best, actually — Connor had these fantastically rosy cheeks, the cat laid down calmly on Aaron’s lap, and everybody was in focus at f/6.3 with off-camera flash. We had our moments of Are We Done Yet? — but we have those every year, just about.

I wished I’d remembered to comb Connor’s hair for our 2012 photo, and I wish he were sitting up straighter, and I wish the cat weren’t trying to escape (as usual), but otherwise it actually turned out pretty decent.

Connor’s first Christmas portrait was one of those awesome slice-of-life moments, where he cried his fool head off while we took the actual photo, plus Aaron and the cat looked like they were photobombing Connor and me, thanks to a narrower depth-of-field than I’d intended.

Before that, it was just a matter of keeping everybody in focus and happy — which I still had issues with, even without a kid in the mix.

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