When to book your holiday card session (earlier than you think)

Every year I get messages in the last week of November asking about holiday card photos. By then the honest answer is that the cards will be late. Not because I am busy, though I am. Because of arithmetic.

Working backwards from the mailbox

Start at the end and count back. Every step is real and none of them can be skipped.

Cards should land in mid-December. Earlier is fine. Later and they arrive during the week everyone is traveling, or after.

Mail them by around the second week of December. Domestic mail takes a few days and December is the worst month of the year for it. Anything going overseas needs considerably longer.

Printing and delivery: allow one to two weeks. Standard turnaround at most printers, longer in the run-up to the holidays, and longer again for anything letterpress or custom. Rush options exist and cost more.

Choosing the image and laying out the card: allow a few days. This step always takes longer than people plan for, because it involves at least two adults agreeing on something.

Editing and delivery of your gallery. Ask me for the current turnaround when you book and count it into the total. It is the one step here that varies.

Add those up and the session needs to happen comfortably before the end of October. Which is why the message that arrives on 25 November cannot produce cards that arrive on 15 December.

So when is the actual window?

The comfortable window is mid-September to mid-October. That is the recommendation.

It is not just about deadlines. Those weeks are the best weeks. The light has lost its summer haze, the heat has broken, sunset is still at a civilised hour, and early foliage color is coming in without the trees being bare. September in particular is the most consistently pleasant month to photograph in Philadelphia and it gets a fraction of October’s bookings.

The last safe date is roughly the end of October, assuming nothing goes wrong.

Early November is possible if you are quick about choosing, and if you accept bare trees and the fact that sunset drops to about a quarter to five once the clocks change. There is a note on that shift in the month-by-month golden hour guide.

Why October fills first

Because everybody wants the same six Saturdays.

The overlap between peak foliage, comfortable temperatures and holiday card deadlines is a handful of weekends, and every family photographer in the region is booking into the same ones. Add a rained-out weekend that has to be rescheduled into the next available slot, and the second half of October disappears fast.

The practical consequences:

• Book October in the summer. August is not too early to ask about an October date, and by late September the good weekend slots are usually gone.
• Consider a weekday. Weekday evenings in early October are widely available, the parks are far emptier, and the light is identical.
• Consider September. Genuinely nicer weather, real availability, and only a fortnight less color than the first week of October.

Which weekend the color actually peaks is a separate question and less predictable than people assume. The fall photo guide goes into the timing.

If you have already missed it

Not the end of the world. Options, in the order I would try them.

Send a New Year card instead. Removes all the deadline pressure, arrives when nobody else’s card is competing for space on the mantelpiece, and lets you shoot in November or even early December in bare-tree winter light, which photographs beautifully. This is my genuine first recommendation for late bookers and not a consolation prize.

Book a short session and a fast printer. A mini session runs about an hour and produces a smaller set of images, which is plenty for a card and cuts every step of the timeline. Pair that with a printer offering rush turnaround.

Use a digital card. No printing, no mail. The deadline becomes the session date.

Skip the card and book the session anyway. The card is a deadline. The photographs are the point, and they are equally good in January.

What makes a photo work on a card

Worth knowing before the session, because it changes what I shoot.

Leave room. Card layouts need space for text. A frame cropped tight to everyone’s heads gives the designer nowhere to go. If a card is the goal, tell me, and I will deliberately shoot wider versions with empty space in them.

Horizontal and vertical. You will not know which layout you want until you are looking at templates. Having both is worth ten minutes of the session.

Everyone looking at the camera, at least once. I shoot mostly candid, and candid is what you will love in ten years. But the card is the one photograph where grandparents want to see every face. We do that deliberately, early, before anyone is tired.

A simple background. Busy backgrounds fight with text.

Color that suits a card. Reds, greens, warm neutrals and evergreen sit well against typical card designs. The general rules in the what to wear guide apply, with the extra thought that this image will sit next to a printed message.

Booking in practice

A family session runs two hours and delivers thirty edited images, which is more than a card needs and about right for the whole year’s worth of prints. A mini session is the leaner option if the card is the only goal.

If you are reading this in the summer wondering whether it is too early to ask about October: it is not. That is exactly the right time.