Its Christmas and Santa would have dropped all your Wishlist toys… This year I decided to do a Christmas Greeting Card using Stig (Yeah that long forgotten TopGear’s tester) as the theme. I been using Stig as my Christmas dude for some time and this year again he is back with that home made Santa’s hat! His ride of choice is the “Road Signature Collectibles” 1:18 scale 1953 Ford F-100 Pickup, which I unboxed recently and it worked like a charm!
The idea for this Christmas photoshoot is Stig picking his gifts in ride of his choice with a massive loading trunk to carry his gift boxes. The Ford F100 worked perfectly in this regard and color brought out that jingle vibe! The setup is pretty simple and the background is image in my iMac! The base was actually white sheet of paper with a bit of white sand which gave me that snowy texture.
Camera setup is also my generic setup with my 15 year old Nikon D3100 with Nikon 40mm Micro Lens! This set up gave me enough DOF to give me that realistic feel. I kind of love the 3/4 angle of any SUV so I took this approach and that Stig’s traditional posture made it just awesome.
For the most parts the shot out of the my DSLR was pretty good… But I am a person who wants more so the post-processing started! I used Photoshop as I am used to it… before that I did a bit of color-correction in Nikon NX Studio to start with! All I have to do in photoshop is to add a bit of fog and some snowflakes to bring up that Christmas vibe!
Oh yeah, I almost forgot that I added a ‘CLAUS” license plate and it made this scene far better! Also it is a kind of an ester egg that even I will find it interesting! This is where the post-processing of this photo ends! I mad two version in 6:4 (the above photo) and a 5:4 version for my Instagram feed @xdiecast, which is ok but not that perfectly framed as this one here.
Finally the Christmas/Holiday card part… I am not that great when it comes to these kind of graphics designing but did ok this time around (I guess) bringing the Christmas sprit out! Overall I had fun capturing this beautiful photo, which is my kind of Christmas celebration and have to say I a wonderful Christmas! Wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Fantastic New Year 2024… Have a good one!
