One of my greatest passions is photography. Back in 2006 Hubby bought me a Canon 20D for my birthday. I also received an amazing telephoto lens. I predominately took photos of The Offspring’s softball games. I had so many parents ask me if I would take photos for them because I was able to capture the stop-action of the rapid game of girls fastpitch softball. I created collages for our family and was quite happy.

Later that fall, while I was getting my hair done my friend Kim asked me if I had thought about taking Senior Portraits. I got really nervous. What if I screwed up? I couldn’t re-capture the moments, Kim said, “Oh, you’ll do just fine. You’re a really good photographer so … will you take Nicole’s Senior Portraits?” I agreed and we booked a date.

I have to admit they turned out great… especially for my first attempt. Unfortunately I took these when I was on a Windows computer and I had a hard drive crash and BOTH of my backup DVDs failed! UGH! I LOVE my Mac’s TimeMachine no more lost backups – that and two additional external drives for all my photos!

Here are a couple of the photos I found on in a “postcard” I had created…

Kim loved them so much and she referred me to other people. Over the last five years, almost all Senior Portraits customers are as a result of Kim’s referrals.

Nicole had a baby last year. I was going to take some pregnancy photos for her, but she had complications and we ran out of time. I had hair appointment and took my camera (Nicole was the receptionist). Very good thing… Nicole had her bouncing baby boy shortly after our visit.

Here is the “snapshot” (by no means was it a portrait)…

I wanted to do something special for Kim and Nicole, so I worked to hide the background, shadows and bring out Nicole. I just hoped that she was happy with the results, it wasn’t my best “job”… I guess it doesn’t matter what I think… She loved it! 😀

Several years ago, I created my own Photoshop Action to create the black frame. Unfortunately, I still have to manually create the white “stroke”. I haven’t figured out how to do it automatically – still learning more complex Actions. I want to add the stroke and the title to the Action. I’ll keep you posted. 😉

Anyone interested in downloading this action?