A Gingerbread House on Kite Hill

Imagine taking a walk to Gas Works Park and finding a life-sized gingerbread house perched atop Kite Hill. The roof is tiled with chocolate snaps and festooned with gumdrops! The eaves are dripping with snow-white frosting and, wow! Look! There are people climbing on the steps of the house to enjoy its sugary goodness! Just thinking about it brings out the kid in me. But alas, it’s only a camera trick, though a marvelous one created by photographer Tracie Howe.

Tracie sent us the photo and told us about this particular project:

I wanted to share the holiday themed photo with you, just in case you could find a use for it. It’s an illusion of a giant gingerbread house on top of the big hill; a camera trick with only a tiny bit of Photoshop. It’s a photo to inspire Christmas spirit and I know people would get a kick out of it.

I was intrigued and wanted to know the story behind the project, and Tracie was kind enough to indulge me:

Last year at about this time, I wanted to develop some more interest in my Facebook Photography Page, and get more people to interact instead of just looking and commenting on my photos. I decided to use myself as a model, since I was always available to myself, and do a monthly self-portrait. I asked my fans for theme suggestions each month, and they loved coming up with some crazy ideas! I was able to generate more fans and interest than ever before, just by being willing to get in front of the camera for once, and often make a fool out of myself. My year’s worth of self-portraits are archived here: http://www.traciehowe.com/category/themed-self-portraits/.

So, my monthly self-portrait run was coming to an end and I wanted to go out with a bang! I also wanted to get some of my local fans involved, so that they could share in the making of this grand finale of self-portraits. Several people came out, as you can see in the photo, and we fed everyone coffee and donuts to make an event out of it.

The suggested theme that I chose was “gingerbread house”, so I needed to come up with a way to involve a group of people. I figured I could make it look life-size, and all of the people could be finishing the building of it. Pouring the “snow” included! I worked long and hard on a nice looking, foot tall gingerbread house that I designed myself.

I rigged up a contraption to attach to a bike stand, which held the foot tall house up in the air. I took it out to Gasworks on the day scheduled for the shoot (perfect weather!), lined it up, and waited until everyone was ready to go. My remote wouldn’t work quite that far away, so I had my boyfriend just push the button after everything was set up. There was a bit of bike stand in the photo, so I did edit that out in post-processing, but that’s all.

It truly was a group effort in so many ways, and the photo even shows a sense of working together to make something awesome happen! Even though I staged it, it still gives me a strong feeling of holiday spirit. I even made it my Christmas card for this year!

You can see the final gingerbread house below, with more fun shots here. Photos documenting Tracie’s project are also below, courtesy of Laura Weber Morceau of Casual Family Photography. If you’d like to read more about Tracie’s project, visit her blog here.