Four Part Family Photo

This year we sent out a few Christmas cards (mainly just to relatives) with a picture of our family on the front. It's a shot of all three of us on the main street of Banff, Alberta, the mountain resort town near Calgary:

I think it turned out pretty nicely, but that was only after a bit of wrangling on my part. We got home from our anniversary trip to Banff and realized that we should have taken a family photo while we were there, since it is such a nice backdrop. We had several decent pictures of us with Scott, but nothing of the whole family, and it didn't seem likely that we would have a chance to go take some more pictures before it would be too late to mail out a few cards.

So I set to work in Photoshop. Here is the photo I started with. As you can see, Scott is quite hidden from view.

I took Scott's face from another picture, and rotated it to fit into the new space. The first time I pasted it in, it was way too large (his head was bigger than mine) but the final version is pretty close to scale.

What family picture would be complete without mom? I had this perfect shot of R posing near the stroller that was a cinch to clip and add in.
For fun, I also threw in an extra mountain in the background. I think I determined that this was Mount Rundle. The sun is hitting it at a completely different angle than everything else in the picture, but I didn't really worry about it.

It seemed a little strange to send out a doctored photograph on our Christmas card, but I didn't do anything too dramatic to try to improve our appearance, so you can consider this a fairly reliable representation of what we might look like if we were to pose together on the streets of Banff.


We hope you had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.