Family Composit Shot 21 People altogether

It has been four years since I was last with all of my wife's family at Christmas. The last time we shot the whole family in one sitting and it was a mess with lots of tears and a very painful experience for all involved. This year in an effort to have a family picture and still maintain peace and harmony we shot the people separately then i put them all together in one composite. This made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable for all involved and well worth the extra work on my part. If you click on the picture you can go to flickr and see the individual shots as well as several outtakes that were fun to do.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/slaterza/832812​4768/

I like it! That's a neat idea, and nice way to avoid possible conflicts.

Really well done !

Well done, that is a great idea!

Sensational work - well done

Thanks for the comments I appreciate it. It was well worth it the entire family loved it.

I love it... will be a challenge to hang, but a wonderful and creative idea... and you can see everyone so much better than if you had lumped them all together in 3+ rows.

We did talk about the hanging challenges that this method might make before taking the picture. The final picture measures 8x40 but this was well received and it will hang over a mantel so they thought it would be OK at this size. You are right this needs to be thought through before using this method for sure. Thanks for the comment

Great job. Bravo!

Brilliant idea! Well done!

Amazing!! What software did you use? Photoshop?


rawb

@ rawb1102

The software that I used was lightroom and photoshop. I processed all the photos in lightroom to make sure the light was consistent and that the color balance was the same as these were shot over several days and there was some slight variation in them. Then I exported them full size and composited them together in Photoshop.

thanks again for the comments

The outtakes on Flickr were great. You should be proud of what you did. Will this be the new 'xmas standard' now?

@BDKR we had a lot of fun doing it but we live in China four years at a time so we are home only once every four years thus the reason it has been so long since the last one. I am guessing the next family photo will be in 2016 or 2017

what a large family