Decorate Your Home With Year End Memories

The holidays are in full swing and if you’re like us you’re hosting a few get togethers this year.  Since It’s been a few years since we’ve had friends and family over for the holidays I figured it would be a great time to update some of our art work with some recent family portraits.

We did a large print acrylic gallery wall a few years back and we absolutely loved it.(check them out here.)  This is the first thing you see when you walk into our house and I didn’t want to lose the impact of those large prints so I knew I just wanted to update them and not necessarily do anything totally different.  But since last time I went a little more abstract I figured this time it might be nice to see our faces.

Since I was going big and seeing our faces and I know the quality of printique prints, I wanted to get as much detail as possible so I got a hold of the new Hasselblad X2D with a 55mm lense (available at Adorama here.).  The resolution and clarity on this camera is amazing and having that medium format look really stepped up the portraits in my opinion.  I always tweak the colors, but with this camera the color profile is so nice and the 16 bit color really let me play and give them all a nice consistent look. This will definitely be my go to camera anytime I know I’m printing anything. Our house is filled with lots of pinks so like before we wanted to keep the pink, but this time I wanted to give it a bit more edge, so I made the lighting more dramatic and went with a darker background and then added a pop of red to each of our photos to tie them all together.

For lighting, I used 3 strobes and a reflector under the eyes. I had a key light camera right with a big 48” octobox. The rim light had a 1×3 softbox from the back camera left. And then directly behind the camera I had a strobe with an 84” parabolic umbrella at a very very low setting just to lift the shadows ever so slightly.

Just like last time, I wanted the pictures to not just be faces, but also represent us and show off some of our personality and interests. I like the stoic straightforward look to my portraits so Ivdecided to have everyone keep a straight face and still try to show personality. My wife Jess sells vintage clothes and loves fashion so we put her in a bunch of vintage jewelry and a vintage top. Again our son is a gamer so we wanted to capture that. With the headset and controller and the coke bottle added that extra bit of red. Our daughter loves all things Disney and is the goofball of the family, and is also starting to grow her love of vintage clothing and jewelry like her mom. And for me, I obviously love cameras and photography, tattoos and pirates so I tried to get that all in and include that pop of red all around. 

Printique was clearly the best choice for these prints. I love the quality of these. They are solid heavy pieces of art. In person they just look luxurious and elevate the room. The gold mounting posts that I went with are beautiful. In my opnion, they really add that extra bit of glam to the images and help the art pop on the wall.  Since we just replaced old prints mounting them was super easy, just unscrew and replace. However original installation was almost just as easy, but is probably easiest with 2 people. They come with everything you need and easy instructions. Hardest part is just getting the right spacing down.  

Robert Wagner is a Commercial Photographer and Videographer, based out of Toledo, Ohio. He specializes in creative portraiture and stylized retouching.  . You can view his work HERE on Instagram. He is also creative director and photographer for his wife’s blog and Instagram page which you can check out HERE.