This idea was for my own personal Christmas card. My one elf costume was worn by each of my models as they pretended to pose for a ‘selfie’ with an invisible plastic Santa.

The figurine of the Santa is only 10cm high and the shallow depth of focus one would normally get with such a close-up image was overcome by creating a series of photographs: From a tripod the camera lens was focussed at various parts of the model Santa so every bit of the subject was in focus in one or more of the series of images. With the images stacked in registration on layers, Photoshop’s ‘Auto-Blend Layers’ function was able to mask out the blurry areas to produce an overall sharp image.