Christmas Cards + A Giveaway!

It's that time of year again, time to scramble and book a last minute session with a photographer (if you can) or ask your neighbor to take a quick snap of you and the fam so you can get a personal Christmas card out to your friends and family before the New Year hits!  Of course, ideally you would have already had that photo session booked with the photographer of your choice (hopefully me!) and your Christmas card design ready and waiting for that perfect family photo to insert with the envelopes addressed and ready to mail off December 1st.
Yet very few of us live in an ideal world and sometimes it is hard, if not impossible, to be that
always put-together Martha Stewart persona we dream of.  For those of us not quite prepared, Shutterfly and their AMAZINGLY HUGE selection of Christmas cards is there to make at least the Christmas card selecting part of the season easy and quick.  With just a few clicks of the mouse, uploading a family image and typing in your family's name, you can have a custom and well made card to send out to your loved ones...and they'll never know you waited until the last minute since Shutterfly's processing and shipping is so fast!

Most photographer's offer their client's the option of choosing one of only a few designs to create their high-end press printed cards.  While I can definitely appreciate this and the many design options presented, I've found Shutterfly to be an excellent and comparable alternative.  For the past 4 years I have used Shutterfly to create photobooks for myself and to give to family members as gifts.  In addition, I use Shutterfly to create photo calendars each year using pictures taken from that exact month of the year before so I can see how much the children have grown and changed from year to year.  These calendars are also given as gifts and are now looked forward to each year.

This year while trying to decide what to do for our family Christmas card I saw that Shutterfly offers a huge selection of designs - ranging in folded 5x7s, to flat stationary cards to the more economical flat photocards.  I myself tend to have trouble deciding on just one photo to include with our card, so I appreciate their large selection and options of using one photo or multiple photos.  Here are a few examples of some of the multi-photo designs I really like:

If you don't care to send out Christmas cards, it's not too late to put together some amazing photo gifts for friends and family.  Shutterfly offers many great photo gifts that I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding something wonderful to make with your family images this year!  If you don't have a big family but still want to send out cards, I love that Shutterfly even includes a fun option for you to highlight your favorite furball!

Now are you ready for a giveaway??!  Shutterfly has generously allowed me to give 2 of my readers 25 FREE cards!  Did you see that?  25 amazing cards absolutely FREE!  They are available through December 31, 2011 and to win all you need to do is comment on this blog post by Thursday November 17th.  I will pick the two winners using Random.org and send you the codes for your 25 free cards from Shutterfly.  That's it, easy peasy!  So please pass this along and good luck with crossing off all the projects on your Christmas "To Do" list!

Also a reminder that it's not too early to book your 2012 photo session with Mindy Newton Photography.  I book a limited number of sessions each month so give me a call or send me an email if you'd like more information or want to get a session date on the calendar!


Disclosure: As a blogger, I am receiving 50 free cards from Shutterfly for this post.