Creating Beautiful Imagery with Holiday Props

The holiday season is just around the corner, which means you are going to start receiving opportunities to shoot holiday content for your clients! At Shutterstock Custom, we deploy a lot of holiday-focused assignments during this season, as our clients love to include celebratory cues in their marketing content.

With the holiday season being one of the busiest times of the year for photographers and videographers, now is the time to start gathering those seasonal props. To help you stay organized, we’ve outlined some great holiday prop suggestions for you to use when creating festive content. 

Christmas and holiday plants

Bring a bit of the outside inside with pine needles and mistletoe cues throughout your frame. Pine trees, poinsettia, pine cones, mistletoe, ivy and holly are all fantastic plant options to include in your holiday prop kit. Bonus? They will make your shoot location smell heavenly.

Christmas lights and light bulbs

Nothing says holiday like a bit of beautiful bokeh on the Christmas tree! Twinkling lights in the background of your product photographs are a fantastic way to highlight your subject, and bring interest into the frame. Shoot these types of images at a low aperture to get that creamy bokeh technique. Check out this guide on aperture to figure out the camera settings you need to do this.

Ornaments

A small, beautiful ornament can add a lot of visual interest to your frame. Stick to classic and simple ornaments to add a bit of pop into your photo. If you are on a Shutterstock Custom holiday assignment, make sure the ornament you use matches the brief’s theme and brand guidelines, and does not include any characters with trademarks or copyrights.

Snow

Nothing says holidays like snow, so if you’re shooting holiday content outdoors try to incorporate snow or ice into your shoot. Don’t live anywhere where there is snow? Bring snow indoors! Check out this DIY for a way to create beautiful artificial snow for your imagery.

Fire and wood

A perfect holiday night often involves a crackling fire, hot cocoa in hand. Whether it’s indoors or outdoors, using fire and wood as props is another great way to bring the outside into your frame. The warm glow of the fire is a perfect backdrop for a holiday focused shoot, and creates the ultimate warm and fuzzy festive mood.

We hope these tips help spur some inspiration for your next holiday shoot. Have any other tips you’d like to share? Comment them below!

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