Photographing in the snow + Creating a holiday card photo

I admit that I usually obsess over the photo(s) I take to use for our holiday card each year, but for a good reason.  My friends and family view me as a photographer and how would it look if I sent out cards with meh photos?  How would you feel if your hair stylist had a bad hair day every time you went for a haircut?  Or if you met with a new personal trainer and he/she looked completely unfit?  See what I mean?  I also prefer the photo to be holiday-like, which usually comes down to the clothes the girls are wearing along with the background.  For example, photos from a fall photo shoot don't fall into the category of "holiday" so I can't use those.

For no reason other than laziness, I delayed setting up a "photo shoot" this year.  I call it a photo shoot but I really only need two photos - one for the front of the card and one for the back, so it's not a full blown shoot.  We could be done in two minutes if everyone cooperated.  If you have children and you photograph them yourself, you know how that goes.  So this year, I delayed and in the meantime, we received a few cards and I realized that I was over-thinking the whole thing.  No one sits and studies Christmas card photos.  They're looked at and hung up or tossed into a pile of other cards.

I still wanted a good photo though.

Waiting to take photos actually worked in my favor because we had an early snowstorm in December.  Even better, it took place during a Saturday, which meant I didn't have to worry about school and having enough light.  Anna was scheduled to have her hair cut later in the afternoon and while I would have preferred to have taken the photos after her appointment, I knew there probably wouldn't be enough light.  So I planned to take photos after lunch but well before we had to leave for Anna's haircut.  If it was light enough outside when we returned home, I thought I could shoot off a few more photos.  (That never happened.)

Clothing was actually super easy.  I didn't care what the girls were wearing for leggings, tights or shoes because no one would see as I was taking chest up photos.  Anna already had a red sweater dress so that was my starting point.  I wanted to stick to holiday-like sweaters.  When I was out Christmas shopping with Grammy, I purchased two additional sweater dresses on sale.  I paid less than $25 total for both dresses.  This is where having triplets works in my favor.  The girls all wear the same size so buying clothes is fairly easy.  If one doesn't like it, another one will.  When they came home from school and I showed them the dresses, Emily grabbed one and Allie grabbed the other.

Photographing in this kind of snow is a bit messy for a variety of reasons.  The snowflakes were fat and wet and falling quickly.  This lead to wet hair in a matter of minutes.  While it looks cool to have snow falling in the photo, sometimes flakes are captured in spots where you don't want them. Like right over someone's eye.  In the photo I ended up using for the front of our card, I cloned out a snowflake in front of Anna's lip.  That was easy enough to do.

If you want to capture flakes as flakes (frozen movement), make sure you use a fast shutter speed.  Otherwise, the flakes may look like rain.  I took one set of photos and then we went inside to dry off.  I didn't like how high my ISO was so I lowered it and adjusted my shutter speed when we returned outdoors.  Unfortunately, my shutter speed was a little bit too slow and there's too much movement of the snow for my liking.  In case you're wondering, the too slow shutter speed was 1/250.  (Hey, it's the first snowfall of the season so I was a little rusty.)  

Most importantly, don't forget to protect your camera and lens from the elements.  I have a large Ziploc bag with a hole in the end for the lens to stick out.  Fold one up and keep it in your camera bag.

Here are some photos I did not use.  We have a lot of trees, including pines, on our property and the ones I had the girls stand in front of are Christmas tree-ish.  I try not to pose the girls too much for these types of photos.  They are all the same height but when I asked them to put their heads closer together, sometimes Allie or Emily on the end bent too much.    








I have no idea.





And, of course, the photos I ended up using for our Christmas card.



I usually have the girls pose silly for the photo on the back of the card but this time around, I had just kept shooting when they weren't being serious and ended up with a winner.




Camera equipment used:

Nikon D750 camera
Sigma Art 50mm f/1.4 lens



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