Merry Christmas 2012!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2013. Here’s the Christmas card design for this year. I knew I wanted to use sparklers to make a Christmas Tree, but wasn’t sure how. Hannah and I started by using a torch to see how they came out before moving on to the sparklers. I thought you might all like to see how we ended up with the final design…

1. Set up tripod, camera in landscape at 28mm, 10 second exposure, f22, ISO 100. Resolution set to highest (22MP) as I knew I would want to crop. As you can see, the first effort wasn’t very good!

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2. Trying to make a traditional Christmas Tree shape with star on top and pot at the bottom proved tricky.

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3. So we moved on to the idea of circles (not very well at first!).

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4. Now you can see it coming together…

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5. The one above was good enough so we switched to sparklers.

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6. Getting there…

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7. This was the shot I used, cropped to about half way. I increased the contrast, saturation and pushed the black levels up to max.

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8. The final design. I removed the bottom ‘swirly bits’ in Photoshop. To fit in with my brand colours I adjusted the hue to blue.

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Et voila!

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