{"id":125,"date":"2014-01-02T20:52:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T20:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/debralwallace.com\/the-story-of-my-christmas-card-candid-family-portraits-on-the-westside-rochester-ny\/"},"modified":"2014-01-02T20:52:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-02T20:52:00","slug":"the-story-of-my-christmas-card-candid-family-portraits-on-the-westside-rochester-ny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/the-story-of-my-christmas-card-candid-family-portraits-on-the-westside-rochester-ny\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of My Christmas Card ~ Candid Family Portraits on the Westside, Rochester, NY"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I look at Christmas lights, snow and emails littering my screen with coupon codes and discount offers, I also want to see a fridge smothered in cards.  Any kind is fine – preferably the type that lay flat with a great photo (ones I took are especially fun) and some sort of Holiday-ish greeting is fantastic.  Some people who have it together even hire me in September for this picture, intended to grace the front of their Christmas cards three months later.<\/p>\n

Several years ago I set out to do what is condescendingly called shoot and burn photography in the photog world.  I found most people hiring me actually wanted products and were excited about them, which gave me the bug too.  I discovered a fantastic lab that prints custom everything and have now given me a card addiction.<\/p>\n

I had become bored with standard designs.  Now that I had the whole quality and design thing under control, I set out to also have the whole family portrait thing under control.  Yes – my family photos tend to be your garden variety snapshot (albeit with a real camera and usually without me in them).<\/p>\n

The problem is that our special needs son, Christian, has been losing the ability to walk for several months and doesn’t travel well.  I really wanted to include him, but the summer was crazy and by fall it got really difficult to get him outside so we couldn’t do a true location portrait, which is my first love.  So I settled for the living room. I even ordered a specially mounted photo of Matthew for the kids to hold.  We tried on two different days.<\/p>\n

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I would call this an epic fail.  Day two was so bad I won’t even show those.  I reverted to my usual go-to candid, semi-bad portraits with Christian and Matthew added via collage.<\/p>\n

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Somehow this photo makes me happy.  Jason and I look great, there’s a beautiful waterfall in the background and it was one of our first honest hikes as a family (though it does feel weird without everyone there).  I’m still happy with it.  It was a great memory and the kids are being their usual non-smiling-for-the-camera selves.  I trained them to ignore me with a camera, so I guess that backfired.<\/p>\n

I’ll take this over the sitting on the couch in matching clothes any day.  Maybe next year I’ll get my act together a bit earlier and we can arrange for Christian to be wheeled to some snazzy grassy area… shoot, maybe I’ll even hire a professional. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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When I look at Christmas lights, snow and emails littering my screen with coupon codes and discount offers, I also want to see a fridge smothered in cards.  Any kind is fine – preferably the type that lay flat with a great photo (ones I took are especially fun) and some sort of Holiday-ish greeting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debras-personal-posts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debralwallace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}