Christmas Card 1997

My photograph for 1997 was of a cute squirrel eating a nut. Taken in Cambridge Botanic Gardens, Cambridge, UK, in 1991.

I had recently got my first zoom lens. My first film with was a test film. For my second film I photographed several things that I had been wanting for a while to photograph if I had a high enough telephoto lens. One of those were the squirrels in the local botanic garden. I took 4 shots and was lucky enough to get this classic pose as one of them.

(Unfortunately the squirrel is an eastern grey which is an invasive alien, a species which has almost completely displaced the native red squirrel.)

Camera = Pentax K1000.

The border was an appropriately pine-tree based design I quickly sketched with a felt-tip pen. Unfortunately I miscalculated the dimensions (drawing it larger and then photocopying down), not allowing for the photocopier not being able to print right to the edge of the paper, and so the border got clipped slightly by the photograph. Whilst scanning the card for the WWW, I corrected that by enlarging the border relative to the photograph. However this will require a printer that can print right to the edges of the cardboard.

Christmas Card 1997 Back

On the bottom left corner of the back of the card I put a small drawing about 5 cm across. Some people have liked that even more than the main photograph on the front! Hence here it is magnified.

They are little creatures I call 'blobs' that I have doodled occasionally (very occasionally - far less than once per year & only about 4 times as a full picture like this!) for the past couple of decades.

Downloads

• Photograph in screen resolution (as above).
• Drawing (from card back) in screen resolution (as above).
• Photograph as a high resolution scan for printing.
• Border (including card back drawing) as a high resolution scan for printing.

Card assembly instructions to duplicate the original (well, original with corrected border size; to really duplicate the original, shrink the border on the front of the card by about 5% before printing):

1. Get the full resolution photograph printed at 5.5"x3.7" on photographic paper. If it does not have rounded corners then round them by cutting off the white bits at the corners.
2. Print the border using a laser printer (or print once and duplicate by photocopier) on A4 160 g/m² white cardboard.
3. Fold the printed cardboard into an A5 greetings card with one straight crease.
4. Glue (or double sided selotape or similar) the photograph to the card in the correct orientation. Take care not to make the photograph too soggy.

Printing the border & photograph together on a colour printer does not give as good results (neither home laser nor inkjet printers have yet reached photographic printing quality). It also costs more (because of the ridiculous current price of printer ink) and gives a more mass-produced look.

More Christmas Cards

For the rest of my Christmas cards, go up to my Christmas card gallery page.

By Andrew Hardwick.
Distributable under GPL or CC-by-sa freeware licences.
Written 2008/2/23-3/2.
High resolution images added 2011/12/28.
Metadata updated 2017/3/30.
Available on-line at http://duramecho.com.