Holiday cards, I love them!!!  I truly believe sending holiday cards makes the world a better place. Even though the holiday season is short, I love taking a moment to reflect on the valuable people in my life.  When the cards start rolling in for the season, every single card that fills our mail box gets celebrated and appreciated.  

I spend a good amount of time creating designer cards for my clients with their gorgeous images on them.  When I am photographing a session I definitely shoot to maximize creativity in a card.  I have several categories of images I photograph for when I know I will be creating a card 1- traditional faces at camera, 2-snuggle image full of emotion, 3- interaction image, 4- kids alone 5- something silly.  At the very least a card has a front image and a back image and I like the front and back of the card to compliment each other.  This is why I photograph at least 5 styles of images at every session.  We won't use every style of image on a card but having the diversity to work with does provide maximum creativity and personalization.

The session below is a great example of what I aim for when photographing for a card. After all my years photographing families and creating cards I can tell you this -EMOTION is more important than perfection.  I always feel like I have created a superiorly posed, lit and composed image at every session AND this image will be overlooked almost every time for the image featuring snuggles and emotional connection.  I have learned to treat the snuggle as priority.  I have also learned to make a few funny faces during your session just to remind everyone not to take life to serious.