Merry Christmas! I always enjoy taking photos of the Christmas decorations, tree, and miscellaneous sights in and around the house. It is always a challenge to find a new perspective, or lighting, or scene since each year is mostly the same decorations as the previous year. This past week, I have used all three of my cameras, the Canon 7D Mark II, the Fuji X100s, and the iPhone 7 Plus to photograph the images collected here.

Above, a Christmas village scene is setup in our living room.  Photographed with the Fuji X100s in the evening handheld. I still am amazed at the photos this camera can take and colors the Fuji reproduces.

To the right, our Christmas tree stands in the living room late at night. Believe it or not, but this year I downsized the tree to keep things bit simpler ... well that was at least my intention. While a good foot short of our 9 foot ceiling, the tree is quite wide and full. Thankfully this year there have been no tree-related mishaps (so far).

Photographed with the Fuji X100s, I used a small tripod and took multiple images to create the final composite photograph seen here. The final image was slightly modified in Adobe Lightroom CC for exposure and I added a vignette.

I have had my iPhone 7 Plus for a couple of months now and I have experimented with the portrait mode a few times. Overall, I am really impressed. The two images to the right were created using the iPhone 7 Plus handheld. Basically the same scene during the day and at night. These images have been cropped slightly.

During the photo shoot that created the previous post, I used the Fuji X100s towards the end of the shoot to try and capture a wider perspective of Luke in front of the Christmas tree since I do not own a lens wider than 50MM for the Canon.

To the right is a photo of Luke post processed in Photoshop CC using Nik's Silver Efex Pro II and additional dodge & burn and sharpening. I like how his leg and paw are posed and also how the light fell onto him. Although a bit overexposed and washed out straight-out-of-camera in the standard Fuji color profile, the photo really pops in black and white with a small amount of burn to the background to make Luke pop out.

Finally, for the past several years I have created a holiday greeting to post on Facebook and the other social media sites. I typically have an image or an idea in mind well in advance of the big day, but this year with a week remaining I had no image and no ideas. Thankfully earlier this week mother nature came through with a decent snow fall and the cardinals visited the bird feeder while I was photographing. 

For this year's greeting, I used the image from the Canon 7D Mark II and the Canon EF 100-400MM F/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens of the male Northern Cardinal on top of the bird feeder as the base image. Using Adobe Photoshop CC, I added animated layers of snow falling and a festive holiday track. The final video I posted to my Instagram account.

That's it so far for the 2016 holiday photos. Thanks for stopping by today!

For full size images, click on the thumbnail below: