{Holidays} Family Photo Tips and Holiday Cards

For years, the simple thought of having Family pictures taken put me off !
My kids are quite close in age so for the longest time there was always a baby at home. And a baby meant I felt I had absolutely no time or energy to organize a family picture session, let alone plan the outfits and look put together on the pictures !!! I was simply exhausted and could not cope with the stress of it...

So of course, no family pictures also meant no picture Christmas cards, I used to resort to buying impersonal ones....

Last year, this changed !
If only I had known earlier that with a little planning the process was not as dreadful as I thought...

Here are a few tips learnt the hard way (!), I am no expert, but with 3 young children I am pretty organized, and it is do-able !!!

START EARLY
It won't come as a surprise but planning early is the answer ! The last thing you want is to have your photos taken so late that you will have to rush order your cards...

In an ideal world, you want to be able to order your cards in November, giving you plenty of time to address them by hand and send them long before the holidays.

Therefore your pictures should be taken well before Thanksgiving, possibly even in September or October... I know it is hard to plan this early but there are many advantages in having your pictures taken in the early days of fall.
First of all it is less cold ! and that means more wardrobe options :) you can pretty much dress however you like in September, you cannot in December when it is freezing...
As well as giving you some room on what to wear, you will also get more options for a shoot location earlier in the season. I live in California, so this is not a big problem for us, but I imagine people living in colder parts of the country trying to get young children to pose for pictures outdoors in the snow... not the easiest.

OUTFITS
This was probably the biggest put off for me ! Planning what to wear !!! And have some sort of coordination between us...!

After a few family photo shoots the trick for us seems to be to start with one garnement, usually a dress for one of my girls and start matching the other outfits.

Here are a few exemples... On all those pictures, one of the girls is wearing a flowery dress and our outfits colors are matched to the dress. This is a simple enough rule for me and seems to be working well. I tend to stick to only one garnement with busy patterns.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Choose somebody you will feel comfortable with, it could be a professional or a friend, but whoever it is, you want them to capture your family truly.
We worked with Lilla Kuknyo for our pictures this year and we love how she managed to capture us :)

And don't forget to book them early...

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: CHOOSING YOUR CARDS
Now that you have done all the hard work, have fun choosing a design for your holiday cards !!!
This year I ordered our cards from Tiny Print and I absolutely love them !!! They turned out perfect.

After browsing through the many designs I picked two that I thought would compliment our pictures well. I chose the elegant foil stamped design for our family and the fun colorful one for our friends.

Personalizing the cards was very simple and options were well explained. The download of my pictures to the Tiny Print website only took seconds. The whole process was very easy.

And of course, the finished products are gorgeous ! Especially the foil stamped cards, I am so very pleased with how they look !
I got the enveloppe and liners to match, and now everything looks so elegant and special.



Disclosure: All words and opinions are my completely my own. Items for review were provided by Tiny Prints at no cost. No other type of compensation was received for this review.