Every family takes Christmas photos and almost nobody prints them. Partly that is inertia, and partly it is because the photos themselves are hard to love: taken at 4pm in December with the curtains shut, everyone half-dressed in new pyjamas, one child mid-blink and one adult mid-sentence. The fix is not a better camera. It is picking a better moment and standing in a better place.
Take it before Christmas Day
Christmas Day is the worst day of the year to photograph your family. The light is gone by mid-afternoon, the house is at its most chaotic, and everyone is either cooking, eating or asleep. The photographs that end up framed are almost always taken in the week before — a walk, a tree-decorating evening, the first proper cold morning — when there is still daylight and nobody is exhausted.
If the point is a photo you will print, treat it as a separate ten-minute job rather than something to squeeze in between courses.
Light beats background, every time
The single biggest difference between a photo that prints well and one that does not is light. Indoor Christmas lighting is warm, dim and comes from above, which is unflattering on faces and forces phones into a high-ISO mode that produces grain and mush. Two rules solve most of it:
- Face the window. Stand everyone so the largest window in the house is in front of them, not behind. Backlit family photos look dramatic on the screen and print as silhouettes.
- Go outside if you can. An overcast December day is a giant softbox — the most flattering light of the year, and free. Ten minutes in the garden or on the front step beats an hour under the ceiling light.
If the photo has to be indoors and after dark, turn off the overhead light and use a lamp at face height instead. It sounds fussy; it is the difference between skin tones and orange.
Poses that do not look posed
Formal line-ups date badly. The family photos people keep are the ones with something happening in them, because a photograph of people doing something ages better than a photograph of people waiting for a camera.
- Give everyone a job: carrying the tree, hanging one decoration each, holding the dog.
- Photograph the moment after the joke rather than during the countdown. Say something to break the pose and take three frames straight after.
- Get low with small children rather than shooting down at them. Camera at their eye level changes the entire feel of the picture.
- Let people touch — an arm round a shoulder, hands held. Families standing 30cm apart look like a work team.
Getting everybody in, including you
The parent who takes the photographs is missing from every photograph. Fix it with a phone tripod and the self-timer, or lean the phone on a shelf and use the volume button on a pair of headphones as a remote. Set it to take a burst of ten and you will get one where nobody is blinking. Do not hand the camera to a stranger and hope; ask them to take five and check the first one.
Ideas worth repeating every year
The most valuable family photographs are the ones with a series behind them. The same shot every Christmas becomes something no single photo can be:
- The same doorstep, same order, every year. Children grow visibly; adults barely change; the composition does the storytelling.
- Everyone on the stairs. Awkward the first year, indispensable by the fifth.
- A photo with the tree, deliberately including whatever has changed — a new baby, a new dog, a new house.
Print them at the same size in the same frame each year and the set becomes a wall rather than a pile of files. Frames cut from the same moulding match exactly, so a series ordered a year apart still lines up.
Which photo to actually print
Choose with a longer view than the group chat. The photo that gets the most reactions is rarely the one worth framing — reactions reward novelty, and framing rewards familiarity. Ask instead which photo you would want if the house were on fire.
- Faces readable, background quiet. Framing enlarges everything, including the clutter.
- Check the file, not the thumbnail. Open it full-screen and zoom in. Anything shared through WhatsApp or downloaded from social media has been compressed to a fraction of its original size — go back to the original on the camera roll.
- Black and white rescues bad light. Grain and mixed colour temperatures look like faults in colour and like character in mono. If the photo you love was taken under the ceiling light, convert it.
Printing it, and giving it away
A photo taken on any recent phone will print cleanly up to around 16" x 20" (50cm x 70cm). Bigger than that and you want a real camera or a very good, very still phone shot. For a hallway or a stairs — where family photos usually end up — 16" x 20" reads properly in passing; anything under 8" x 10" becomes wallpaper.
If it is going to be a present rather than a fixture, the safest framing choice for a house you have not seen is plain: oak, black or white, with a white mount. And if you have more good photographs than walls, a photo collage puts a whole year into one frame instead of making you choose.
We print and frame all of these to order — see Christmas gifts for the family, Christmas photo frames, or the full range of Christmas gifts. If this is a first Christmas, the baby's first Christmas frame adds the name and the year under the photograph.