Festive snow fakes

Put kids in a snow globe to boost Christmas photos with James Paterson

- James Paterson

Here’s a fun project to try over the festive break, and a great way to learn new camera and editing skills. Over the next few pages we’ll show you how to make a Christmas snow globe composite. We’ll shoot two separate images for this – first the children then the snow globe, and blend the two together in Photoshop. To add a little extra depth and colour to the composite, we have also supplied a collection of lovely bokeh images for you to use (download link on page 48), either in this project or to add an atmospheric glow to any festive photo. The key is to match up the details in both photos. The more consistency between the two, the easier they’ll be to blend together.

So we need to think about consistent lighting, camera angle and depth of field. As the aim is to place our kids behind a glass globe, we can recreate the situation by shooting them through a window while they press their hands and faces to the glass. As such, many of the camera skills demonstrated here can be used for many different sorts of festive photos.