This was my first year ever offering a session like this. This Christmas in a Box minis setup was so completely different than any gallery of photos I have ever delivered. Which made it so much more fun, but I was also a bit nervous! When I did the Christmas in a box minis promotional shoot in July, I had thought out a lot of the poses and had everything set the best way I thought, and it all went according to plan. My worry though, was how will this all work out as back-to-back sessions, and will my clients actually want a collage of their photos compared to the gallery they would usually get.

The final product looks so different from what the actual session looks like. I will show some behind the scene shots of what some of these photos look like before I edit them all together. All in all, I think everyone had a lot of fun doing these Christmas-in-a-box minis. Kids really loved them, because they were allowed to crawl into a box and do some fun activities that didn’t really make sense at the time to them, but they thought were funny.

I, luckily, at the foresight to create a solid template for my collage. So that I would be able to just drop in the photos and then connect them around the frame if needed, which made the process much easier and faster.

The setup

I had a lot of questions of how this whole setup works, and it is literally one big box. It is a 4x4x2 ft box set on a bed frame so that it is off the ground a bit. And that is it! The hard part is everything that has to do with the camera and post-processing. I had to center the camera perfectly in the middle of the box, far enough away to get some space around the box. Then had to place my flash and large diffuser right next to the camera to completely fill the box with light and not have weird shadows in the top corners. I then turned off my auto focus once I had it set and then just had to hit the shutter for capturing photos.

Thank you!

Thank you to all the families who trusted the process with these! I know it was a bit different from a normal session but the result is just so cool!

I also couldn’t resist doing one for Brent and myself with all of our animals. Pixel and Bokeh really weren’t impressed with our shenanigans. The dogs were really unsure but cooperated as much as they could. Henry though, he really stole the show. He did things without us even prompting him, such a crazy cat!

Now that I do have the box, I might do more of these in the future! Stay in the know by becoming a MINI VIP!

Check out all the collages below and at the end, I will show some RAW photos to show the actual setup!

Behind the scenes photos

The photos below are the original cropping before I crop them into a square and then insert into my collage template. Let me know what you think and if this is what you think it would be!