Christmas Card Outtakes

This past weekend was a beautiful autumn one in Belgium. I am trying to get a little jump on Christmas cards this year, since they will have to be shipped here from the US, and then most of them will turn around and go back to the US. So I grabbed a blanket, Jay, a camera, and headed outside to spring a surprise photo shoot on the kids. Trust me...not what an 8 and 10 year old are most looking forward to when they are already playing outside with their friends!

I have noticed as I looked through the last years worth of pictures that I have fewer and fewer of the kids together. It used to be so easy to get them to pose lovey dovey together. Now...not so much. So, I needed to take some new photos of them to come up with a nice Christmas card.

I had a couple things I wanted to try for the photo shoot. On occasions like this, Jay knows he is the photographer and I am the stylist/visionary/OCD mother. Jay also knows to just "go with it" at this point.

We started with a blanket on the grass. Great idea for this overhead shot with the kids head to head. Failure #1. The sun was still too bright for this idea, and I ended up with a lot of this:
Umm, yeah, not so much.

So then we moved on to back to back. Cute but not what I wanted.


I had wanted to get a few individual shots of the kids too. Jackson- no problem. He wanted to get back to playing ASAP, so he acted like a professional model: come to "set", give me the shot I need, and head out. Jensen, however, believed that giving me variety was they key to a great shot.


So, lastly it was time for the grand inspiration. I had seen a card template with the caption "Silent Night, Holy Night." We took MANY shots trying to make the "shhh" face. They were trying so hard to make the "right" shhh face, but the funny mouth poses led to a couple serious shots, and then many of the two of them cracking up. The shot might not have worked overall, but certainly the best part of the afternoon was seeing those little faces I love light up with those huge giggles.
After all this, we did get some really great shots for the card. I ordered them this morning, and hope to be able to get the out a little early this year.

Please tell me I am not the only one that has to take TONS of shots to get the right ones. I love them all though, and felt they were worthy of a debut on the blog.