We had the pleasure of photographing one of our Donegee ladies for a holiday photo last year. Dannie who came up with the idea shares how her holiday cards came to be.
My partner Charlie and I started to receive cute store-bought holiday cards from mutual friends. I have a large extended family, so I’m familiar with getting holiday cards especially if they’re married with kids or are living out of state. I have a love for handwritten cards and sending mail to my friends. I mentioned to Charlie that since we have friends out of state, we should send one out and as photographers ourselves we should do a full photoshoot.
As a photographer, I’ve done enough family sessions to know what to expect for holiday card photos. I’ve seen all the poses from the sitting together joyfully in a natural setting to the formal poses of a studio session. I wanted to change it up and know that our holiday card with stick out from the rest. Because of my personality and rapid-fire thinking, this quickly went to “we should formally dress up for it” to “we should dress up in ridiculous costumes.”
Even though I love the color red, I felt that the Mr. and Mrs. Clause look would not work for us. I briefly considered elves, but I couldn’t think of a way to make it flattering for Charlie. The only option left was reindeers. I went on to Amazon to find inspiration and oh boy did I find it. I asked Charlie “should we be cute reindeers? Or creepy ones?” his mistake was saying “whatever you want!” — I went for the creepy reindeers masks.
With my Amazon Prime, the masks came pretty quickly, and we booked my business partner Victoria Hungerhurst of Donegee Media for the session. We opted to shoot in Frazier Park, and it just so happened that it snowed a couple of days before, so it felt fitting for the holiday card. I took out the mask to which Victoria reacted with uncontrollable laughter while Charlie responded with “I thought you were gonna get the cute ones!”
There were three downsides about the masks. 1. It smelled awful on the inside. 2. Our vision was compromised. I had to guess where Victoria and Charlie was and often walked into bushes. 3. There was no installation so under the masks are nose was running, and condensation was building up inside. I was pretty animated about wearing this crushed velvet dress, and Charlie went without a jacket so that we could match in colors. Shop the look with a coupon code for SHEIN.
As we were shooting Victoria and I discussed how this could also be a critique of engagement photography and what it means to have beautiful photos of the session. How much is the couple and how much of it is from the composition, lighting, and angle? If there’s real love, does it matter what you look like? We couldn’t answer any of these questions because we couldn’t last more than 15 minutes in the cold. It was super helpful to have shot and modeled for Victoria before because we could easily understand what look, we both wanted. This made the session so much faster, and we were able to get such a wide variety of poses and angles. We proceeded indoors to drink tea and hot chocolate by the fire.
The response from our friends was phenomenal. We will be continuing this to create a new tradition, but have not decided if we wanted to stay with reindeers or if we should try a different creature each time. I’ve joke that if we were to do this every year as reindeer, we should pick different locations for different times of the year so that by the 12th year we will just release a calendar. What do you all think? Stick with the deer or something else?
Where should we shoot our next holiday card? Yes, we will be wearing reindeer heads.
