Just a quick post on what went in to making our 2011 Christmas card that can be seen over on the main site.

The idea came after our visit to the LEGO Kid Fest in Cleveland a month or so ago.  Every year these things seem to get more complex, but that’s part of the fun!  Carter and Paige had lots of little Christmas themed sets from the Advent calendars that they get each year from St Nick so making the scene was going to be easy.  I was a little more concerned with how I would get their faces on the LEGO people.

I started off by killing the ambient light and making sure that the back wall was going to be isolated. Then I threw in a rim – a Canon430EXII on a PW Flex with a 20 degree grid. I just wanted the light to hit the scene and not get anywhere else.

Then I brought in the key to light up the front of the scene. Just an small Wescott softbox with another 430EXII and Flex in it. That looked OK, but needed fill so I added a reflector at the bottom and basically ended up with a butterfly lighting setup.

I thought about Photoshopping the snow in, but we had some fake snow around from our holiday decorations so I put the kids to work. While they made it snow, my wife held the 430EXII/Grid and I reached in and held the reflector.

Once I was able to grab a shot that didn’t look like a white out blizzard, I moved on to capturing our faces to use for the LEGO people. Another simple butterfly setup that was a little hot since I was going to drop out everything but the main feature – eyes, nose, mouth – I wasn’t concerned with capturing details of the skin. This is an AB800 with a Flex/AC9 attached to it.

I took everything into Photoshop and put it together. I tweaked converted the head shots to b/w, tweaked the levels to loose the skin tones and just kept the blacks. I then used layer blending multiply to overlay them on the yellow bricks. Messed around the the transform tool until I had everything the way I liked and presto! A finished card!