Mammoth, 2004 copyright Douglas Stockdale
It tis the Christmas season!
Which also means creating the annual Christmas card to send out with our good wishes for the holidays to our extended family. So ensues the annual rite of selecting the Christmas appropriate photograph, then off to Costco for bulk printing and finally the weekend of addressing and subsequent mailing.
First, the Christmas image which for my family means something that suggests winter, which also means something with snow. The trouble is that in Southern California we rarely see snow (even today, temperature is the low 70’s F), unless we go “visit” it. As I recall that in Israel where Jesus was born has similar climate as us, so why this “snow” thing with my family? Perhaps growing up in Michigan, there was usually a lot of snow during Christmas. So this usually means that I need to go back through all of my skiing photographs to find a landscape that might be appropriate. In this case above, this was a 2004 ski trip to Mammoth which is located the California Serra Mountains. If I recall it was a really snowy day and I had a little Canon G2 4mp camera tucked into my ski jacket. Made for a nice photograph.
Next, I like to see images printed since the cards will be printed, so I upload this image to PhotoShop and then while trying to get the Epson 4800 ink nozzles unclogged, I ran out of Light Black ink. Way too many head cleaning cycles this time. Okay, I knew I was on the edge of needing a new ink cartridge, but thought I was going to be okay, so regretfully I did not have the replacement on hand. poop! Off to one of the local camera shops (Samy’s in Santa Ana), and realizing that my Light Cyan was on the edge of running out, saw it prudent to buy both cartridges. Light Cyan was not in stock, but thank goodness the Light Black ink was. So I was quickly back in business tweaking and printing my image.
Printing of the Christmas cards was quickly accomplished overnight and I was able to select the layout ahead of time on their web site and probably could have down loaded the image as well, but I am a bit old school, so I went to the store to manually input my design into the template.
This past weekend spent almost the entire day writing out the cards, which were sealed and delivered to the post office late last night. Done!
So wishing you all a wonderful Christmas holiday and a great New Year.
Cheers!!
Doug
Singular Images 