Even though our eldest son, Josh, is almost 19, he’s still with us and able to continue our tradition of a family photo on Christmas morning.  We started taking our family group photo in-front of the Christmas tree in 2010, when our youngest, Karla, was still an infant.  Back then, the boys were frustrated with the process (“hurry up Dad, we want to open the presents”), but now everyone knows we have to get dressed and take the family photo before any gifts are exchanged.  

I’ve even started filming the process.  As you can see in the Behind-The-Scenes video I made this year, we actually have a lot of fun posing in front of the tree, and getting our family photo just right.

Once the photo is taken, and the presents have been opened, I try to get the RAW picture edited and onto social media as soon as possible.  This year we were running a little late for a Christmas breakfast, so rather than importing the RAW file onto the computer and processing through Lightroom, I wirelessly brought the photos across to my phone and opened Instagram, applied a filter and uploaded to Insta and Facebook straight away.  I thought I would have had to re-edit the photo in Lightroom when we got home last night, but the Instagram photo turned out so well I didn’t need to do anything else.  Instagram re-saves a high resolution copy of the photo, with the filter applied, that I’ve since been able to also publish on Flickr and this blog.  The filters and performance of Instagram have certainly improved a lot over the past few years.

I’m not sure if Josh will still be living with us in 12 months time, so this may have been our last ever Christmas morning photo with all five of us together… and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

You might also be interested in this earlier blog post – simonyeo.id.au/2016-christmas-family-photos