The Family Christmas Picture

I am not a traditionalist by any means. I am also relatively cheap. Combine those two factors with the fact that Adam has a phobia of professional photographers and you get exactly two professionl pictures in Adam's life. Sometimes I fear this makes me a bad mother. I always acknowledge the dozens of pro pictures of their kids at varying ages adorning people's walls and fireplace mantles and silently reflect on my own shame for not having enough of my own. But then I reason that I take enough pictures on my own and they generally come out better than the stiff poses of unhappy children you get in those photography studios.

I am not a good photographer but kids are really easy subjects. Especially when they are your own. All you have to do is follow them around with the camera snapping away and eventually you'll capture something cute or funny or revealing in a way that you had not intended. But I have never been able to get a good Christmas picture. Last year I had a grand scheme and the mental picture I took was fantastic. Two dogs with reindeer antlers and Adam wearing a Santa hat in his Christmas PJ's. It didn't work.

I had failed, in my fantasy, to consider the tired 18 month old who would refuse to wear his santa hat or sit still. Or the dogs attacking one another because they look like aliens with their antlers on. I guess that's how fantasies work, though. Here's what our one picture with all three wiggly little subjects ended up looking like:



It did not go on our Christmas card.

This year I tried again. Only without the dog. I figured I would have my hands full enough with two wiggly babies. To my surprise, they cooperated marvelously and the very first picture I tried to take turned out great. The only problem is that I tried to remove the red eye using the red eye feature of Photoshop. Being the genious that I am, I overdid it, making Adam look like the RCA dog. To further illustrate how intelligent I am, I saved over the original file!

Here's what it looked like:


I tried to fix it Photoshop and ended up making Adam's eye look like it was melting off his face so I scrapped that plan and re-washed the Christmas jammies the next day and tried again. The kids weren't feeling in the holiday spirit.





So I went back to plan A and found a good replacement eye for Adam. I patched it on there and blurred a few lines and it almost came out normal looking.



Notice they still have red eyes. Maybe this is why people hire a professional.