Myrtle Christmas 2025
This is the ninth year in a row that I’ve made a Christmas photo of Myrtle to send out in holiday cards. And, to be honest, I think this one is the best we’ve ever done.
Christmas 2017 she was an otherworldly cute puppy. Christmas 2020 had the best classic staging and lighting. 2023 melded my interest in woodworking into the mix by having her sit in the toy box I made for her among all her toys. 2024 was a fresh departure from tradition with a paired-down white backdrop for a more minimal approach.
This year, I wanted to get creative with it. I wanted a challenge—something that would stand out and make the recipient stop and actually look at it for more than a couple seconds.
I took a box, made a wooden frame out of scrap to put around it so it would keep its shape, and stapled a black piece of cloth with a slit in it to the back. Myrtle stuck her head through the slit and out of the front of the “gift box”, and the goal was to decorate each box with something different. Ashley devised a lot of the art direction within each box while I added small stuff around her work. I moved the camera around four times to achieve the different perspective per quadrant.
Even though she’s a very well-trained dog, she has her limits and decided when she was done. We felt like these were the best four options of the many we tried, and I stitched everything together in Photoshop. There was absolutely no AI used for any of this; just good old-fashioned Ps. There is only one object that I added in post from a generic Google image search that wasn’t actually in any of the photos. If you email me your guess, I’ll tell you whether or not you got it right.