Holiday Photo Shoot 2015

Studio set up, complete with a bowl of bribes

Thanksgiving was a nice day, filled with family, hours of driving (to two get-togethers) and a lot of good food.  I was still suffering from food coma on Friday when I rounded up the pigs for the annual photo shoot.  (Maybe leftover cheesecake for breakfast wasn't such a good idea.)  This year was a first - we shot our Christmas photos outside!  The weather was mild and the lighting was better than indoors.

It took longer to move the table and fight with the camera than it did to actually photograph guinea pigs this year.  Usually we have issues with focus, depth of field and uncooperative rodents.  This year's problem was the flash.  I deleted nearly half the photos for being too dark (frustrating!), but the rest were clear and well lit.  I had more than enough usable photos after two short shoots.

Do these snowmen taste good?  Can I hide behind them?

Rob's view and my view - look at that blob!

Cannoli and Boadicea were really well behaved.  Well, I mean relative for guinea pigs sitting for formal pictures.  They insisted on walking off the set in opposite directions, but they stopped that for the second round of photos.  Boadicea took way too much interest in taste-testing the scenery when I couldn't feed her bribes fast enough.  She ate part of one snowman when I was busy chasing Cannoli.  Noli had difficulty staying in one direction and constantly knocked over snowmen.  However, by the end of the second shoot Boadi was bored enough that she settled down to take a nap on the set.  I've never had a pig do that before.  Just look at that blobbiness!  Do whatever you want, Mama, I'm going to snooze right here.

Their good behavior means I don't have a whole lot of truly goofy outtakes.  I've whittled down the photos to the three "good" ones that go on our Christmas cards.  There's a bunch more left; some of those are arguably better than the card photos, but don't make the final cut because they don't crop well to a 4x6 size or one pig isn't as cute/funny as the other.  So I'll inundate you with more holiday pigs in another post - they're too cute not to share!