Wacky Winter Portraits at Post Road

Submitted by Melissa Reed

Combine ugly holiday sweaters, tacky backgrounds, awkward poses, and strange, silly facial expressions along with patrons and staff ready for a good laugh, and you get Wacky Winter Portraits at the Post Road Library! Our goal was to recreate the beauty—and awkwardness—of holiday photos from the past and provide our patrons with silly winter-themed photos that they can enjoy now and for years to come. 

In planning for these programs, we realized that some families might need some inspiration for how they might want to pose. Many of our staff members quickly volunteered to do their own wacky portraits that we used on marketing posters and for display as a photo gallery wall during the programs.

A variety of holiday decorations were made available to our staff (and later, our patrons) for use in their photo sessions. Tinsel, beaded garland, Christmas lights, and wrapped boxes were among the items available to serve as props for the pictures. Our staff had so much fun taking pictures and coming up with wacky ideas for how to pose. 

The staff pictures served as great practice for finding ideas for poses and editing the pictures. Thanks to the background remover function on Canva, we were able to easily remove the boring meeting room wall background and insert a variety of interesting backgrounds to the finished portraits. 

While some groups did opt to take “nice” pictures, most of them really embraced the opportunity to be wacky and awkward. Kids had permission to make faces their parents might often tell them to stop making (there were lots of stuck out tongues and crossed eyes!), and adults made odd faces, closed their eyes on purpose, and stared off into space with fake smiles. 

There were lots of breaks for giggles because of the ridiculousness of what they were doing. Anyone who is a parent knows that kids are often unhappy when they hear that it’s family picture time, but these photo sessions were quite the opposite, with kids coming in super excited and bursting with ideas for poses, often directing their siblings and friends on what they should do next. 

Patrons commented to us over and over about how much fun they had and how much they appreciated this program. One patron said that she couldn’t believe that this was being offered for free! Another parent said she was excited to have the opportunity to be in a picture with her kids because she is usually the one behind the camera and isn’t in the shots. 

Once all the photos were taken, the editing process began! Over 900 pictures were taken! This was no small task, but those of us editing the pictures had great fun finding just the right images to use and the perfect backgrounds to insert. The options on Canva allowed us to come up with many fun, wacky designs. The edited photos will be shared with the patrons for them to use as they wish. 

Staff and patrons had so much fun with this program that we are already planning to not only repeat this next winter, but to also hold wacky photo sessions at other times of the year as well.