In the early days of my path, I would take on a photography job here and there when a friend or family member would ask, but it was still new and very experimental to me. My main job was being a mom for my kids who were still very young at this time. My daughters both started taking dance after they turned 2. They were put in the recital at age 3, and at age 5 could audition to be in the fall ballet production - every other year it's Nutcracker and every other year it's a story ballet. I first started as a performance photographer for shows. The first few I snapped pics from my seat in the show. Over time I stayed for dress rehearsals and was one of the two or three people they had floating around taking pictures of dancers on stage.

With taking so many pictures, I became more and more accustomed to using Photoshop to help process pictures, and I was quite good at that. This led to an entirely new role I took with the studio and still keep doing today, six years after my last dancer took a more professional road.

One year I didn't like the way the text on the Nutcracker flyer blended into the picture they were using. I pointed out to someone that I could make the text pop a little more - it was easy, it just needed an extra stroke and a shadow. Boom. Fixed. The regular person they had doing most of this stuff was headed off to college or in college or something, they eventually needed someone else to fill the role. That ended up my job - for the past 15 years or so.

I was asked to do some cutouts for shirt designs and eventually ended up designing the shirts and then the show posters. I used Photoshop to do all of this. It was all fine and dandy to a point, until the shirt designer eventually needed Illustrator files so everything was in vector form. I had opened Illustrator a time or two and was immediately intimidated by it. I avoided needing to use it at all costs. I didn't know what a vector was and didn't think I ever needed to. Welp, times change and little by little, YouTube tutorial after YouTube tutorial (something I do to this day for any Adobe product) I learned what Illustrator was and how to use it and I think it's my most used Adobe program to use today.

Back to photography... In the early days (as in the picture listed here), someone else -Clem Dickey - took the pictures and I did the design. My first Nutcracker poster and several shirt designs were not my pictures, but rather my designs. They got more refined and elaborate each year as I learned more and more about the creation process. Every year we start with nothing and come up with something by showtime. This year is a Nutcracker - the shirt design is finished but no real clue what the poster will be...