Making of a Christmas Card.

Like many families, we make our own christmas card, this was ours for 2013.

Once the initial idea was born and a quick sketch was made, I ran outside to quickly catch still a glimpse of day and the few millimeters of snow that had just fallen in Helsinki.

Shot against the sun, flagging the camera lens by hand, it was the perfect lightning to create the impression of a full moon shining on the snow. Developed in Camera Raw slightly darker and colder to enhance the night feeling.

The next day I was able to shoot us models against a cloudy sky (which worked as a giant softbox) during twilight hours to get advantage of a simple led construction lamp.

Back home while transferring the files, it was a digging into the archives to find the missing background sky to work with. And thanks to NASA for the moon.

Once all the clipping paths where made it was just a matter of transforming and putting the pieces at their right spot, placing the shadows and adjusting contrast/colour balance.

And after I figured out how our "Floorball Star" needed to look like, the biggest and tedious part could begin......

Creating a star-font!

Now we where up to the point my son was happy with his role in the picture, my wife liked the final look, but I myself was missing something still. If this was gonna be a christmas card, then I wanted it to look like a postcard.

So and old piece of paper, a nice clipping-path border, some dodging and burning later, combined with a simple reflection, I had my christmas carol card.

The card became a more or less realistic object, but with the white background becoming a part of the whole it also became too cold to look at.

Thus the added warm and dark wooden background. That also made it easier to look at the picture itself, since brighter parts have a tendency to demand more attentions from our eyes.

Signature and ready, if it was not for the fact that I have many non-religious and non-christian friends, and reaching out to them all with this message would be impossible. One more slight change was needed....

And when you have everything in individual layers there is nothing more easier then opening them up in after effects and move them around a little bit.

Peace to everybody ;)