Valentine's Day Photo Shoot - Perfect Last Minute Gift

Having a child at any holiday seems to make it 10x more special. But with the need to instill traditions while keeping things Pinterest-perfect, there is a lot of pressure as well. I am definitely not immune. Celebrating Baby's First Everything puts me in a tizzy. I want to document it all. It's also important to spoil the grandparents with baby love. For Thanksgiving we did footprint turkeys. At Christmas, we made handprint ornaments. I figured for Valentine's Day it was probably time to let up on the body parts haha.

Instead, we did a mini photo shoot for Valentine's Day and guess what - you can too! I promise, it's not too late. Within 15 minutes of shooting, I had the perfect custom Valentine for baby J's grandparents.

With places like Target Photo that print cards in store (or even using your own printer and cardstock at home) you can have cards printed within an hour of doing the shoot. About 10 minutes after placing my order, I got the email confirmation that my prints were ready for pick up!

What you need is minimal at best. A piece of fabric for a backdrop, a couple glitter hearts, and a coordinating holiday shirt. No pants necessary folks!

First thing's first. Take some ridiculously cute photos of your kids - leave plenty of room for cropping later.

Next, crop the photo to your desired size. I use Picasa for quick edits but you can use PhotoShop, Lightbox, or even PicMonkey for this step. Just depends on your preference.

Once you have a few poses you love, it's time to turn to my favorite free picture editing site - PicMonkey. If you have the deluxe "royale" version that's great too but for the purposes of this post I only used tools available in the free version. There are so many fun options to customize your photos. Sure, you can just tweak the colors and brightness but why stop there?

You can add text from their program or from your PC. Personally I love this because I'm a font snob and have about 500 fonts installed on my computer.

Or maybe bokeh is more your thing:

How about some curly cue overlays?

The overlays are especially fun since you can erase sections of the graphic. In this case, I used two dragonflies to get the wings, a creature stamp for the antennae, and some stars for sparkles.

Why not just combine all of the features into something simple and adorable like this?

You're only limited by your imagination. Once you have a finished product that you like, you can print these at home or use sites like Target Photo or Walgreens to have your designs printed in store. 

It may be less than 24 hours until the big day, but you have this in the bag!

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