The Santa Test

How do you prove Santa Claus is real? Carter and Claire came up with the solution:

Give Santa a written test with challenging questions only he can answer. Add in some math problems to challenge his skills on his busiest night.

I don't know why Santa and I bothered with the hundreds of dollars of presents. When C+C were finally allowed to come into the living room for Christmas morning, their foremost interest was in Santa's responses on The Test, and the cookie and carrot crumbs on the porch from the snack we left.

They must have spent 10 minutes carefully analyzing every response on their test papers. Then they traded papers to read more. Claire was tickled Santa used the "math help box" to show his work on the addition problem.

Their smiles about this magical part of Christmas were fantastic. I'm so glad for the believers in my family.

Gingerbread Factory 2013

The scene around my kitchen table last night, fueled by eggnog and Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. I use a recipe from Martha Stewart called Patti Paige's Gingerbread Cookies ... without the cloves.

When I get tired of rolling dough, the last of the edge trimmings get squished into their own special reject cookie. It's the prize of the batch. Can you spot it?

That glue bottle is actually full of icing, it lets you control where it goes. Any icing mess-ups go into the reject pile ... in my stomach.

All gingerbread is now bundled and ready for giving. You so wish I was your home teacher.

Photo Booth Setup: Seeing Stars

I love the problem-solving aspect of photography. When everything comes together you can knock the ball out of the park.

Earlier this month for our church Christmas party I set up a photo booth. I wanted something foolproof so I could enjoy the party ... of course it ended up being one of my most elaborate setups. But it was a hit and the photos were amazing!

Here's how I did it.

I knew I wanted a fancy background for Christmas. I used a large craft paper punch in black card stock (courtesy photo buddy Sharon) to create a star-shaped stencil to tape over my camera lens as the aperture. For the background I covered a rolling chalkboard with black fabric and Christmas lights. If I blurred out the lights in the background they would become a field of stars.


The challenge: The lights needed to be in the distance so they’d be out of focus. The people in the foreground needed to be in the right spot — in three dimensions — or else they wouldn’t be in the photo. I didn’t realize this until I was setting everything up the night before. I needed an imaginary rectangle in space to keep everyone in my viewfinder, but had no idea how to do it. Time to think on my feet.


The solution: I suspended a discarded picture frame with two screws and old speaker wire from a bungeed rigging. All parts on hand, total cost = $0. After I figured out the proper distances and lined up the foreground, background and camera tripod, I taped guide marks on the floor in case anything got bumped out of kilter. Which it did.


Lighting came from an optically slaved Nikon SB-800 inside a shoot-through umbrella. During the shoot the side of the umbrella was just about touching the side of the lens to keep the light near center to avoid shadows from the frame.

On the other side of the camera I connected a big LCD monitor from the church library to my camera’s video output. People could get instant visual feedback after each snap to see how they needed to arrange themselves inside the frame.

I also had a wireless remote shutter release set up so people could take their own photos from inside the set, but I abandoned this. Once I saw how good the photos were turning out, I ended up directing people so we could get the best shots. We definitely got some keepers.

We had some families show up with 3, 4, and 5 kids, and I wondered how we would ever cram everybody into that small frame. We had them stand on chairs and doing some funny balancing, like a game of Twister. Perhaps watching them work together as a team to get everybody in the shot was the most fun. At top is one of the pictures I’m most proud of, it took a couple tries to get this. I love the layered feature of the set, how you can see what’s going out outside the frame.

The entire set is on Flickr. If you’d like full resolution files for your family let me know.