This year’s card combines two recurring themes: nativity scenes and travel photos. The trip was organized by my Mom’s church and included stops all through Italy, then on to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina. My Mom and Aunt joined me and 42 others on the trip. It was amazing, but had too many stops with not enough time to fully enjoy each location. We had quite a bit of time in Rome and Medjugorje.

In the small town of Lanciano near the Adriatic coast there is the Church of the Eucharistic Miracle. In the basement of the church is an extensive nativity scene depicting Bethlehem as it might have been. There were three large sections of the display; only the first section was included in the card.

The inside image is one of my favorites from the trip. It is a stone tower taken just around sunset. The orange glow inside the tower is light from the setting sun lighting naturally.

On the technical side, the nativity scene image was taken with my iPhone 12 Pro and edited in Photoshop. There were only two images combined for the main image. The original background “sky” is a blue tarp. It didn’t look quite right for the card, so masks were created to eliminate the tarp and instead use the sky from our 2014 card. Some additional tweaks to adjust the lighting of various elements made it complete.

The editing was done on a 16” MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip with 64 GB of RAM. Our first card was made on a Mac with 512K of RAM. That’s 125,000 x more memory, but the performance is a far bigger improvement–especially with demanding applications like video editing. The inside image from Assisi was captured on my Nikon D5600 with a Nikkor 18-300 mm lens and didn’t need much editing. The card was printed by Mimeo again this year