Merry Christmas + Our Family Photos

Merry Christmas from our family to yours! We're planning to spend today at home in our matching pajamas, snuggled up around the tree opening presents, watching Christmas movies, and cooking a (hopefully not too) fancy Christmas dinner.

Prior to the 2020 craziness, Jeff and I always talked about spending Christmas mornings at our house once we had kids, so while this year feels *weird* it's also where we always planned to be. At home with our family, combining our extended family's traditions and making new ones of our own. 

I think I mentioned a few times that taking our family photos this year was, well, exciting. Mia was not having it, to the point that our photographer invited us to pop back during another of her sessions to try again. We cajoled, we danced, we tickled, we snuck snacks into her mouth (like, in basically every photo you can see a yogurt bite!) and we even played videos from Frozen and Tangled on our phones, but nothing really worked. We still ended up with a few photos with smiles (or at least what looks like smiles - sometimes Mia's angry screaming face photographs as a smile!) so I'm calling it a win. Here are a few (of the many, many) from our sessions: 

P.S. Our photographer was Victoria C, we used her last year too and she's also shot some of our friends and extended family! We did our first session (the green photos) at Winnemac Park, and our second session in the Lincoln Park Nature Walk. 

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How We Take Family Photos Ourselves

Whenever I post stuff like this to Instagram, our friends ask who we had over taking pictures. No one guys, it's just us! This is incredibly simple, but in case you hadn't thought of it I thought I'd share.

Use a tripod

Basically, we go old school and use a tripod! This one is what I used to use waaaaay back in the day with my remote shutter release to capture all of those fun roof outfit photos in our townhouse in the South Loop.

(LOL, sidebar story, I never told you this because I didn't want #stalkers, but Mayor Daley lived in the same complex as us (sidebar sidebar, no I never actually saw him) and whenever he was home there was a cop car stationed out behind the house. So yes, there was basically always a police officer watching me take photos of myself 😂😂. And no, we could not afford a condo in that complex, we were renting on the cheap.)

Now I know a lot of you just use your phones for cameras these days, but I still like to have a separate digital camera. There are a lot of benefits as to the control I have and quality of photos and yada yada yada, but another nice one is that it connects to the tripod. Plus, with all these newfangled digital cameras, they connect by wifi to your phone, turning your phone into a remote for the camera! So I can now line up the shot the way I want it, go get in the picture myself, and snap away on my phone until I see we got a photo I'm happy with.

More tips for taking great family photos with a tripod

1. Don't try to get everyone to look at the camera at the same time. With little kiddos it's just about impossible! Instead, it can be just as cute to look at each other and laugh, or to have some people looking at the camera and some people looking at each other. Laughing while looking at each other can be weird, so just tell a joke to get those smiles to be real.
   
2. Pay attention to the lighting. You want to try to get as much natural light as possible without harsh shadows. I like to have us facing or next to an open window whenever possible, but a window where direct sunlight isn't streaming in. Overhead lights can cast harsh shadows and cause yellow tones, so turn them off if possible.
   
3. A little editing goes a long way. Open up your photos in an editing app afterwards and adjust the brightness and contrast for really professional photos. You could do this in iPhoto if you're on a Mac. If you have Photoshop or Lightroom access, use those. In Photoshop, I go to Image/Adjustments/Levels, and then pull the far left slider to the right a little (makes the blacks blacker) and pull the middle and far right sliders to the left a little (brightens the mid-levels and the brights). 

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Family Photos

I had convinced myself for a few months that we weren't going to do family photos for our holiday cards, that we didn't need them and they're too expensive and we had plenty of family photos. But then daycare asked us to send a family photo in, and I realized we really didn't have any good family photos! This was the end of September, and I realized I was too late. It turns out it's a photographer thing to book mini family photo sessions (think 20 minutes) on the weekends in September & October, and they all book up really fast. I was too late!

Luckily I remembered Victoria, a friend-of-a-friend who has shot blog photos for me before and actually photographed Jeff's dad's elopement (and then watched Jeff take these outfit photos - ha!). She was rebooking all of her mini photo sessions because of weather, and was able to squeeze us in.

She was so fun to work with, and managed to coax some smiles out of Mia. Mia actually had been boycotting naps that day and was pretty grumpy, and was just blank staring at first - she definitely got mommy's RBF hahaha. We got the photos back last week, and I'm dyyyyying over some of the cute shots she got. I can't believe I didn't want family photos, because I'm so happy now to have these shots of Mia at this stage.

Warning: cuteness overload ahead :)

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