Holiday Greeting Card | Photo Collage

Programs: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom
Gear: Sheet Backdrop, Nikon D5300, 50mm lens, and lens soft filter cap
I send out Christmas cards every year to my friends and relatives in a feeble Gen-Z attempt to remember how to address a letter. This year, having not been able to visit family during a global pandemic, I wanted to make my own to then print and send off.

To make this non-denominational card, I considered a few themes before landing on the Olan Mills style of 80s photography and cheesy family photos. My s.o. and I are both solidly babies of the 90s, but still vividly remember a variety of terrible photo studios our parents dragged us to. I also wanted to be able to incorporate a "Happy Holidays" message as well as a subtle way to announce to the aunties that I got a new boyfriend and cat (in no particular order). The faux stickers serve this purpose by casually labeling ourselves while also filling awkward blank space.

I took our portraits with self-timer shutter on the Nikon D5300, using a hazy lens filter cap to get a "softer" image. I then brought the raw file into Lightroom to touch up lighting and colors. Afterwards, I did a few things on Photoshop to alter the image to the effect I wanted. I masked the sheet to be a shade of deep blue, did content aware-scale to the background to have us be right-centered, did a purposeful bad double-exposure effect with Kenzo the cat, and added a smidge of grain to the entire image. I topped it off with a collection of "retro" style graphics meant to mimic stickers and added a little drop shadow to give more depth.