I have shown you images before of people writing on themselves in a photo. I think it’s a great way of getting a message across. This time I am posting about writing on the knuckles as if they are tattoos. It’s a concept I am thinking of using for our Christmas card this year. The knuckle tattooing trend was, I think, started by gangs where they tattooed hateful things on their knuckles. I have been seeing photos of all sorts of non-hateful things being written on knuckles and a few fun cards like that as well, so I am thinking that MAYBE my teens wouldn’t mind doing something like that this year. At least they don’t have to stand there and look attractive. I did some research and found the following photos inspiring.
And finally, here is my last card that I am posting for now from the Sigler family at weareheavyduty.com. For their 2008 card they used a long exposure camera and light sabers to make Christmas designs, in effect painting with light.
They are so descriptive about how they did it, I thought I should let them tell you how they went about creating this in their own words in case you want to try something similar.
“This large scale light painting of a Christmas tree was made in our backyard. On the ground the tree was 55 feet tall and about 25 feet wide. It appears short and fat because of the angle of the photograph. I had the camera, and video camera, in a stairwell window at the back of our house. I’m at least four storeys (someone asked, that is in fact the correct spelling) in the air because our property drops quite a bit. We are in the mountains. But the back lot is nice and flat. I used rope to lay out the tree and enlisted the family and some conveniently located neighbors to move the lights around.
The kids were in the middle of the tree swinging the light sabers (see below) in circles to make the “ornaments” and Mars walked back and forth to make a “garland.” The Moms (Mary and Jill) made the tree outline by waving two light sabers each as they walked along the rope, invariably racing at the end of each take to finish in time. I used a kitchen timer and called out the remaining seconds.
I wanted to do some light painting myself so I took the tripod and camera outside and made some “Nöels” in green and red. Nöel (Which I now know should be spelled “noël” – oof, embarrassing. I was in the dark!) is way easier than trying to write “Merry Christmas,” backward mind you, in the dark, before the time runs out and the shutter closes. Plus, Nöel is so short I was able to turn the light on and off for each letter, and add the umlaut over the “o.” I put a strip of four of these inside the card, along the top.
We did something similar for the family shot on the back of the card. For this one I used another camera, mounted on separate stand, just for the flash. That way I could move the lights around to make the frame, then get back into position before the second camera flashed, which would make us visible in the photo taken by the first camera. Staggering the timers on the two cameras so that the flash would happen after I was done drawing, but before the shutter closed on the first camera was a challenge. Have I mentioned we were in the dark? The image came out too dark on the card but the original looks good. This was a fun card to make, but I was stressing about the execution. I mentioned to my friend Gary a couple months ago that I was worried about the logistics and he said something like “only you would have a Christmas card with logistical challenges.” Why do things the easy way? Walk hard.”
Thanks again to the Sigler family for allowing me to show you their wonderful cards. Hopefully I will posting this years card within the next month. Stay tuned. (No pressure or anything Siglers).
I found these great Christmas cards on Flickr done by a guy named Doug Barlow. He has great ideas, he takes great photographs, and on top of that, he has talented photoshopping skills. All these talents are put to good use for the making of his creative and fun Christmas cards.
“Strobist:
Strobes left and right pointed at a low white ceiling.
2 exposures put together in photoshop. 1 of my daughter and the setting and another of my wife and I
I have so much fun putting together our Christmas cards every year. Our families have come to expect something a little different from us and we usually get a great response.
If you look close you can see the camera remote between my fingers ”
Last year (2009) we wanted to make it more about Evinn, so we came up with the concept of her blackmailing santa. Technically the whole family is in the card. My wife is the mommy kissing santa, and I’m the lucky santa
We both loved the idea of Evinn showing the pictures to santa while eating the cookies and milk that she left out for him. She’s at a very manipulative age
This is a composite of a couple of pictures
• Evinn, cookies, milk table and background in one
• hand with pictures (really holding polariods, but pics photoshopped in)
• hand and book (naughty and nice on book photoshopped in)
Strobist: all shots were done with the same set-up, just pieced together so i had more freedom to move things around.
can’t remember my shutter speed, but it was fairly long to let the christmas lights in the background burn in a little.
sb-28 with a makeshift snoot with a white diffuser, behind subject camera left.
sb-25 in a white shoot through umbrella camera right, above, just out of frame”
I can’t wait to see what they come up with this year.
This Sigler Family made their own handmade Christmas card in 2006 using the idea of each of them making a snowman out of different objects which reflects their own personalities. Posted at www.weareheavyduty.com .
In the family’s own words, this is how this card came about.
“Paris had the idea of snow people. We rolled with that and decided to stick with the tradition inside the tradition, individual pieces.
Clockwise from the top left:
Paris used rolled colored paper strips.
Mars obviously used Legos.
Mary worked with yarn and felted the nose and hat. She also broke the mold with a two-ball shorty.
Tracy after a few failed attempts decided to use three lamps, he had made a while ago, for a minimalist, and sort of boring, snow-bot.
Kodak now allows you to put a stamp-sized image on the back of the card. We used a pic of our four hands in the same orientation as the snow folks.
I am once again posting a card which I found at www.weareheavyduty.com, (we are heavy duty). This is a website hosted by the Sigler family. The whole Sigler family, Tracy, Mary, Paris and Mars. They show and talk about all of the creative things that they do throughout the year. One of those creative things is make fun, creative Christmas cards. I will be showing you all of their cards for the past 5 years over the course of the next week. This one is from 2005. This is what the Sigler family had to say about the making of it.
“For the 2005 Christmas card Paris suggested “trees.” As time was running out I continued to mention that we needed to get cracking on the cards. When I mentioned it one night at dinner everyone moaned. Frustrated, I said “you can make a tree out of anything!” Then, I grabbed the greens that were left in the salad bowl and quickly threw down a “tree.” I liked it so I got some dried cranberries for the garland and piece of pretzel for the trunk. Everyone got their trees done that night, with Mary’s being the most skillful, and time-consuming.
The backgrounds were removed and the trees were combined on a single white background. This time we had them printed at Kodak.
Clockwise from top left: Tracy, Paris, Mary, Mars”
Get out your cameras. It’s Christmas Card season and I’m raring to go. I have some fun cards to show you that I’ve found over this last year. So it’s time to start posting.
Here is one I found just today in fact at a site called wearheavyduty.com . This family has this blog where they post of all of the fun, creative things that they come up with. And they have a lot of funny ideas. This card was their card from 2007.
This shot was on the back
They made this card by laying on a green sheet effectively making a green screen so that it was easier to cut out their images in photoshop. Then they photoshopped the images all together and Voila! a very cool, fun, original Christmas card is born. This card is the first of the season to make it to my card gallery. Many more to come. I am hoping that I can do it on a daily basis. Eventually I may even get around to doing my own card….I’m as anxious as everyone else to come up with a good idea and to actually be able to implement it the way it looks in my head.
Sigh. I love Christmas. It’s good to be back showing you what inspires me, amazing Christmas cards. Stay tuned….
I am starting to think about our Christmas Card. Too early you say? Aaaw, then I guess you don’t know me…I am obsessive when it comes to Christmas cards. I am considering going to even greater lengths this year. I have been thinking of trying to do a stop motion video. Stop motion videos are all the rage as you can see from my previous posting on Save the Date videos,; quite a few stop motion videos made the cut. So I ‘ve been scouring the web in search of an idea which is not too hard to do for our Christmas card. I thought I’d share with you some of the best ones I’ve come across. Who knows, maybe you’re as crazy as I am and I can inspire you to do an over the top Christmas Card using stop motion this year. Hey, if people can do it for their Save the Date cards, then why not for their Christmas cards?
This one is called The Human Skateboard.
This one is a Thanksgiving themed one:
This video is an old favorite, seen millions of times on You Tube:
But it is not as famous as this one, seen over 13 million times on You Tube:
It is called The Last Laugh
The only stop motion video for Christmas that made the cut is this one which is an ad:
Many of these videos I discovered thanks to Smashing Magazine with an article on their favorite stop motion videos. However, they also have some tutorials on how to do stop motion videos and it looks very tricky. I hate to admit it, but I think it is over my head. I think I need to wait until my son and my nephew are in college. One wants to study animation, the other wants to study film, so I’ll wait until I can hire one of them. In the meantime, if anyone does anything like this for their Christmas card, or for any other occasion, please let me know because I would love to feature it.
We are lucky enough to spend our summers on a sleepy little Island here in the Northeast. We are always charmed and delighted when we arrive because we are instantly propelled back to small town America. This year we were even more charmed than usual, because as we drove off of the ferry we found ourselves under an enormous flag hanging over the road from the ladder of a firetruck. In fact, as we drove down the lazy little streets we realized that flags were literally everywhere. They were in front of every store and house, in front of the school, the Post Office and little tiny flags lined every road. I was bemused at first, struggling to think of why everyone would be celebrating Independence Day so early. Then I saw a few signs, welcoming home a soldier. “Aaah” I thought, “that’s nice, a local boy is coming home and the entire town is welcoming him”. Then the awful truth hit when I saw another sign saying “We’ll Always Remember You”. This soldier wasn’t coming home the way I had thought.
The next day the body of this soldier arrived home by the same ferry we had arrived on, escorted by a huge assortment of boats. The whole town it seemed went to the funeral, I heard it was the biggest funeral the island had ever seen. It was in a tent which had been put up for the school’s graduation. They agreed to use it for the Memorial Service as well since he had been a graduate from this school just a few years before. At the service, people heard about how this boy had worked on the ferry collecting tickets, how he had excelled at school and sports, and how much he was loved by his friends and family. They described how his last act had been to save his men from a mine. The ferry company that had brought his body home announced that they had decided to rename the ferry after him.
This was the closest I had come to seeing the real impact of war. It hit home to me that the decisions of our leaders don’t just impact world politics, they impact normal, everyday people. Instead of reading the results of a battle in the paper, I saw it in the eyes of this boy’s friends and family. If it were one of my sons arriving home in a box on a ferry, I don’t know how I would go on.
I realize that this same scenario must replay in towns across America. Far too often flags must wave over streets for the same reason. With this image in mind, I designed this card to say thanks to all who’s lives have been impacted by the war in Iraq and Afganistan. Thanks for all of the sacrifices of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, wives, husbands and, of course, of the soldiers themselves. And for any of you who have endured what this local family must be enduring, I am deeply sorry for your loss.
Welcome to HoHumCards.com, formerly Merry Christmas From. Here you can check out creative cards, submit your own unique creation, and get creative card-making tips. Learn more about HoHumCards.
by Karen Robert
Fun idea in a blog by Archie Mcphee
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