Taking My Own Christmas Photos!

Seeing as this is my son’s second holiday season and second Christmas this year, I wanted to have some pictures to remember this time in his life, as well as a nice picture to send out to our family. Knowing my son and how well he does with new people and new environments (which is NOT good, by the way),  I figured I would try to take my own pictures. The following day we had scheduled professional pictures, and he was an absolute beast for that. We spent at least an hour trying to get him to calm down before we could get a few photos in. Luckily another family was before us and my son was so in love with the father in that family. He kept referencing him as “papa” (which is what he calls his grandfather. He loves his grandfather very much incase you didn’t get that).

Also, with toddlers it is nearly impossible to get any good pictures of them at this age (2). This is another reason why I wanted to take my own. My hope was to actually get some that he was smiling in (we got one). I took to the internet to find a few examples of what I wanted for him:

All of these ideas seemed to be great and I absolutely loved the look of the lights. So I headed to the dollar store for some “props” in order to make the pictures *perfect*. At the dollar store, I bought:

1. 3 Jumbo ornaments
2. 1 5 pack of small ornaments
3. A santa hat.
4. A 2 pack of red sparkly bows
5. Mini wreath

For $5 I was then able to take a bunch of (in my opinion) really beautiful pictures. If you have a Christmas tree and some extra lights, as well as a nice tree skirt or holiday blanket or even a table cloth, then that would work as something you could place on the ground. We put my son in some Christmas PJ’s and sat him down in front of the tree and snapped away with our iPhone camera’s. Yes, I used my iPhone, and the pictures came out that good!

The following day we had some family pictures and a few pictures of him taken by a professional. I cannot share those because I signed a contract saying I would not duplicate or copy those photos, sorry ): However, they did come out really nice and we all looked like a million bucks!

Later that day I decided to attempt the last idea I had for pictures, which was the Cozy Coop car picture with the Christmas tree on top. For this we used our own Cozy Coop car, and a fake four foot tree that we already had from previous years. We added the wreath and bow to the front  of the car that I was able to buy from the dollar store. We tied the tree and wreath on, and set it all up then put my son in the car, and got… well… this…

The only way he would clam down to take a picture was to give him a pacifier (insert eye rolling emoji here).

So for the holiday season, those are the pictures I was able to take on my own for under $10. Hopefully, other moms will see this and be inspired to take pictures like this with their little ones as well. If you give it a try let me know, and let me know how it turned out for you!