Speed Boats are not festive.

Well the Christmas season has officially started. I made my first trip to the post office to mail packages and pick up this years Christmas stamps I wussed this year and only bought the cutesy version instead of getting the Madonna and Child. I was feeling more secular than liturgical. I think it was the Post Offices influence, it was the flag stamps next to the BVM that did me in.

This means I’m going to have to send out the cards which means that I am going to have to sit down and address envelopes and sign my name over and over. This year I’m not sending out photo cards. I thought I was going to and than I sat down and very soberly looked the candidates and I wasn’t happy. I had been absolutely sure that one of them was absolutely, positively going to be The Card - but at the last minute it washed out. I don’t know, maybe I’ll use it next year. Sometimes a little time apart can improve my opinion of a photo. I can be, um, very critical of my work. I also probably should have sat down before October to look at candidates.

The One, the bride groom, I took on the afternoon of my last full day of vacation. I saw the scene and knew that it was perfect. It fit my arbitrary requirement for inclusion in the running: it was horizontal, because most cards are and they are easier to display in my opinion and it had a really nice Christmas-y tree and it got bonus points for being was on the beach. It was almost given the job. I had to work to get the picture too. I was out on the beach reading and I looked up and saw the scene and said “That is my Christmas Card and I ran up the embankment and fetched my camera. Then I wandered around the tree for a while trying to set up the right shot. It took forever and I was loseing light, but it was all right because it was for The Card. Sigh.

Later when I was looking at the shot closely after I got the prints back or maybe, I didn’t get the prints back and it was on my parents digital and it wasn’t until I saw the image full size? I started to have problems with it. There was a person in my Christmas Card picture! I hadn’t seen the figure because the sun was in the wrong place and the person was hidden in the glare I don’t have people in my Christmas Card pictures! It is a no person allowed zone! And there was a boat, also hidden by the glare. Bastard glare! I know, “How unusual. A Boat, beach side. How shocking”. It wasn’t the right boat. It looked funny and I all ready had intentionally included a couple of brightly colored kayaks in the back ground and those were fine, they were part of the design elements of the shot. I didn’t need another boat, especially one that appeared to be growing out of the tree’s “head”. It was not an element of the design I was going for.

There was another shot, which had been The Card before the beach tree became The Card. This other one was vertical which pleases me as the photographer and archivist but not as the card designer. It’s the whole vertical v. horizontal issue. It is and was a great shot, very pretty but it also had a smaller non Christmas tree sapling standing next to it and it wasn’t working for me.


See? the sapling kills it. I took it from a distance and the sapling was that obvious at the time.


This year’s card (s) come from boxes and feature as design elements Peanuts™ characters and sparkles.