Christmas card photo ideas

Almost every disappointing Christmas card photo fails for one of three reasons, and it is worth naming them because the fixes are completely different.

The first is light. A living room in December, lit from above by a ceiling light and from the side by a tree, puts shadows under everybody's eyes and turns skin an unhelpful orange. This one has to be fixed before you press the shutter.

The second is arrangement. Five people standing in a line at the same distance from the camera reads as a school photograph. Depth is what makes a group look composed rather than assembled.

The third is colour, and it is the one nobody thinks of as a problem. A Christmas photo typically contains red, green, gold, whatever colour the sofa is, whatever colour everyone's jumper is, and the fairy lights. There is no subject, because everything is competing.

The single biggest improvement available to you is free and takes ten seconds: turn the overhead light off and put everyone facing a window.

Overhead light comes from above, which means it lands on foreheads, noses and cheekbones and leaves eye sockets in shadow. Window light comes from the side at roughly face height, which is what portrait photographers spend money to recreate. An overcast day is better than a sunny one — cloud is a diffuser the size of the sky, and it removes the hard shadows that direct sun carves into a face.

Do it in the middle of the day. In late December in the northern hemisphere you have usable daylight from roughly ten in the morning to three in the afternoon and then you have nothing.

• —Overhead light off. All of it, including the lamp you forgot about.
• —Everyone facing the largest window in the house.
• —Nobody with their back to the window, or you will photograph silhouettes.
• —Overcast beats sunny. Direct sun through glass is a hard light source.

A line of people is flat. A stack has depth, and depth is most of what separates a portrait from a snapshot.

The arrangement that works almost every time is by height and age: tallest and oldest furthest from the camera, youngest and smallest closest to it. It produces a diagonal through the frame, it means no face is hidden behind another, and it has the useful side effect of putting the children at the front where they are actually visible.

Get everybody closer together than feels natural. Family groups instinctively stand about thirty centimetres too far apart, and that gap reads in the photograph as distance between the people in it. Overlap shoulders. Let the small ones lean.

• —Tallest at the back, smallest at the front.
• —Shoulders overlapping, not touching at arm's length.
• —Every face fully visible — no one behind anyone else's head.
• —Camera at the height of the middle person's face, not above the group.

This is the idea that fixes the most photographs for the least effort, and it is the one most people have never considered.

A photograph with one colour in it is a photograph with a subject. A photograph with nine colours in it is a photograph with none — the eye has nowhere to land, so it lands nowhere. This is why the most memorable Christmas cards are usually the plainest ones.

There are two ways to act on this. The heavy-handed way is to coordinate what everybody wears, which works and which nobody enjoys. The other way is to remove the colour afterwards: take the picture in monochrome, or convert it, and let one single thing carry the colour — a red hat, a red scarf, one red object in an otherwise grey frame.

The second approach has a real advantage beyond looking better. It does not care what anybody was wearing. A clashing jumper is not a clashing jumper once the frame is monochrome.

The background of a family photograph is almost always the worst thing in it. A radiator, a doorway, half a bookcase, the corner of a television.

The most reliable fix is distance: move the group two metres further from whatever is behind them. Even a phone camera will soften a background that is far enough away, and a soft background stops competing with the faces.

The strongest version of this is no background at all — a plain dark field behind everyone, so there is nothing in the frame except the people. That is what a studio backdrop is for, and it is the one element of a studio portrait that is genuinely hard to improvise at home. A dark wall in a dim room, with the group well forward of it and lit from a window, gets closer than most people expect.

The most common situation is not that you are planning a photograph. It is late in the year, nobody has taken one, everyone is in a different city, and the only thing you have is a picture from August.

Two of the three failures above can be fixed after the fact. Colour can be removed and reduced to a single accent. A background can be replaced with a plain dark field. Light and arrangement cannot be meaningfully fixed after the shutter has closed, which is why the photograph you start from matters more than anything done to it afterwards.

So the useful question is not "is this a Christmas photo" — it is "is this a good photograph of these people". Pick the one where everyone's face is clear, everyone is close together, and nobody is squinting into the sun. What it is a photograph of matters much less than you would think.

• —Every face clearly visible and reasonably large in the frame.
• —Taken in decent light — daylight, not a dim room at night.
• —People close together rather than spread across the picture.
• —Two to six people. Crowds do not become portraits.
• —The highest resolution copy you have, not a screenshot of it.

If you are having cards physically printed and posted, the real deadline is not Christmas — it is whatever date the printer needs, which is usually somewhere in the first fortnight of December, plus the time the post takes.

That deadline is what pushes most people into taking a rushed photograph in the last week of November. It is worth knowing that it only applies to the printing. A digital portrait — sent, posted, or printed locally — has no such cutoff, which means the photograph itself can be chosen much later and much more calmly.