The Christmas Card Debacle of 2013

This may be a southern thing, but my family has sent out Christmas cards ever since I can remember. When Parker and I got married, I was so excited for our first Christmas for many reasons. One was to send out our very own Christmas card to loved ones. Parker didn't necessarily share the enthusiasm right off the bat, but 3 Christmases into this marriage and I think I've about got him trained to care about the Christmas card. ;)

I wanted our Christmas card to reflect where we lived that year. Last year we took our picture at Pensacola beach, this year I wanted it to reflect Kingsville, and next year...I'm just praying we are still in America. Anyway, I digress. Kingsville, Tx is a small town, but Parker had a neat idea to take the picture on the Naval base next to a water tower that reads "Fly Navy- NAS Kingsville". I actually hated the idea at first, but I have got to learn to trust my husband because he is always right about these kinds of things. We enlisted my mother to take the picture, and she got a few good ones!

So here's where we completely overcomplicated things...

It was nearly impossible to focus the camera on the water tower while also keeping the three of us in focus, so Parker took some focused pictures of the water tower while my mom focused the camera on us.

This is the original picture we chose to use. That flyaway strand of hair on my head bugged me, so Parker saw an opportunity. You see, my husband happens to be a picture-editing ninja. He used Gimp and proceeded to spend the afternoon doing the following:

Original picture on the left, first edit on the right

Now that my hair was tamed, he went after the water tower. The water tower was visible in the picture above, but it wasn't very legible. Remember when I mentioned Parker focused a couple of shots on the lighthouse specifically? So he took this shot... (don't mind me as I smile thinking my husband is actually taking a picture of me and the dog)

...and placed it into this photo. Voila! No flyaway hair and a legible water tower!

After a little cropping, the original and the final version:

Pretty impressive huh? I have to give my husband mad props for this one because I could have never edited the picture like he did. If you have received a Christmas card from us, you may be shaking your head because the final version isn't the picture we sent out. Thankfully Parker enjoyed the editing and didn't feel like he was wasting his time, because after all that work...

We chose this one.

Are we ridiculous or what?! We had completely ruled this picture out originally because it didn't have the water tower and Jenny wasn't smiling. Here was our reasoning behind switching: Though Parker did a great job editing the picture, I felt like it looked as if someone had put us in front of a green screen of sky. Parker swears I told him to make it an all sky background (I have no recollection of this), but we women change our minds 50 times in an hour. When I put that picture into our card template, it just didn't look right. I also like that this picture we chose is just us. It's simple, but it's us. Third, though she has the greatest pupper life ever, Jenny is the most unimpressed pup around. Sending a picture of her smiling is almost false advertising.

So that was the Christmas card debacle of 2013. I know, we're ridiculous. We take our Christmas card seriously around here, apparently!