Photos near the beach – any beach – make for great personalized photo holiday cards. If you live near or vacation near a coastline, you probably already know that looking at photos of your time by the beach can make you feel that all is right with the world. If you live in a warm climate, your personalized photo cards let you share your tropical holiday with all the snow-bunnies you know.

Snow photos near the beach? There’s a whole new perspective for your camera! Envision it: pristine, silent, and shimmering with naturally peaceful wishes. Rocky coastline? Think of your exciting photos of surf spraying upward on impact. You can almost smell the water and air!

Beach photos make for beautiful and memorable photo holiday cards.

You don’t have to live near an ocean coast to share these feelings. My memories of growing up near Lake Erie and the Niagara River give a surge of joy to my soul. You don’t even have to partner an “official” body of water with this joyous appreciation of nature. A photo of a spring-fed pond or a manmade swimming hole, surrounded by lush vegetation and canopied by blue skies, can evoke a sense of peace, freedom and whispering breezes.

Capture a critter within your holiday photo cards and enlarge your message to include animal, as well as mineral and vegetable. Catch a seagull in soaring flight over the water or a pelican atop a rock or a scurrying sand crab. Add a campfire on the beach and you have all the elements of nature: air, water, fire and earth. Get creative by showing empty sandals in the sandy foreground, surf and sky beyond.

In other words, you can send a mental and emotional vacation near the beach as a holiday gift to every recipient of your personalized photo holiday cards!

Every year, my family and I spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s at the beach. It is the only time of year that we all have days off from work, school, and other responsibilities, and can all successfully coordinate a vacation together without too many headaches (missing luggage excluded, of course). We also send beach-themed Christmas photo cards every year to other relatives and friends and this is an opportune moment to take the family picture without any added hassles. One year we tried taking a scheduled family picture at a studio, and between people running late, crying children, and a novice photographer, it turned out to be a complete disaster!

In addition to seeing my family all together and actually enjoying each other’s company, the highlight of my winter vacation is taking beach photos. There are so many photos that a person can take at the beach over the course of any day. Sunrise is always different than sunset, high tide differs from low tide. No two pictures ever look the same! Sitting and watching the tide come in is not only a great time for rest and relaxation and a time to commune with nature, but also an excellent time for photography practice.

A photo of the sunrise at the beach makes for memorable Christmas photo cards.

Taking pictures of the tide coming in and going out is a good time to practice with different camera settings as well. In addition to experimenting with different camera speeds, different settings such as landscape or motion, you can experiment with whether or not to use your flash. Capturing the perfect moment can take years of practice and even the most experienced photographers still do not take the best pictures every single time they take a photo. Since I live in a relatively urban area, going to the beach is always a special experience and a good time to take a break from the busy day-to-day “ebb and flow” of life. The pictures that I take are a pleasant reminder of a restful and relaxing vacation filled with good memories that will last a lifetime.