Making a Holiday Postcard

Every year after I’m done with my Holiday decorations, I take few pictures because it looks nice with all the lights. I didn’t always do this, but I remember a few years back I was looking at some photography techniques on YouTube. The idea was to zoom in or out with your lens as you are taking a long exposure shot to try to get this “time traveling” effect. Ever since then I just got hooked on taking pictures of various Holiday decorations.

time travel, zooming in at long exposures

  • Shutter speed: 1s
  • Aperture: ƒ/4.5
  • ISO: 100
  • Focal length: 80mm
  • Camera: Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT

It doesn’t take much effort to create a postcard and it’s easy to make. You just have to keep few things in mind when you are taking the picture.
– Try not to center your main subject, place it to either side. You want to have room for your text.
– As you take the shot think about your text placement and try to make that part of the image soft focused so the text can be easily read, when placed over the image.

Christmas Decoration

  • Shutter speed: 1/80s
  • Aperture: ƒ/2.8
  • ISO: 5000
  • Focal length: 100mm
  • Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III

Using your favorite picture editing software open the image you just took and place your text over it. In this example below I used Photoshop and the Amatic SC font, which I got from google fonts.

Download my photoshop file

happy holiday postcard with Christmas decoration

Here is another pictures from this session; also if you like any of these images you can download them for free.

Christmas decoration

  • Shutter speed: 1/100s
  • Aperture: ƒ/2.8
  • ISO: 1600
  • Focal length: 100mm
  • Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III
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