Creative Christmas Photography

Christmas is a great time to be a photographer: everyone is happy and relaxed, the kids are preoccupied with presents and offering some perfect candid moments, and you might even find that Santa has delivered you something new to photograph them all with! Christmas also offers the opportunity to try some creative photography too – the kind of thing that makes a great canvas print, perhaps?

There are loads of ways to use decorations to take creative photos – here are a couple to stir your creative juices:

Find a large reflective bauble, ask your child to hold it in their hands and take a photo of their reflection in it. If you do this right and choose a seasonal background, you’ll have a wonderful Christmas portrait.

Using a macro lens or the macro setting on your camera, move in really close to the decorations on the tree and snap away. The depth of field will create some wonderful out of focus patterns with the fairy lights on the tree.

Christmas presents a perfect opportunityto practice your food photography because there’s always an interesting selection of delicious treats to take advantage of – as long as you can keep them out of your mouth, that is! Here are a couple of ideas you could try:

Photograph mince pies and Christmas pudding on a chopping board that’s been dusted liberally with icing sugar to look like snow. Add a sprig or two of holly to complete the look.

Get in nice and close to the Christmas dinner as it’s served and shoot the details. If you have some fairy lights and the tree in the background they’ll help to tell the story of the day.

Christmas is really all about spending time with your loved ones, so make the most of this and grab some beautiful portraits with a festive twist:

Position your kids in front of the Christmas tree facing towards it. Turn off the main room lights, expose for the tree, and use the fairy lights to shoot them in partial silhouette. This is a magical way of symbolising the excitement of waiting for Santa to arrive – oh, and makes for great Christmas cards!

Again, using the fairy lights as your main light source, get in nice and tight as you let your young children reach out and touch the tree decorations. If you get this right it’ll look so atmospheric and festive.

There are loads of great ways to experiment with creative Christmas photography this year, so don’t be afraid to move away from simple snapshots to something a little more daring!