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An accomplished photographer of amateur status, Mrs. Sturdivant is office manager of an electric company for eight hours a day, a housewife for as few minutes as she can manage, and an avid shutter-bug for unclocked spare time. Immediate past-president of the local Photo Arts Club, blond petite Mrs. Sturdivant enthusiastically lugs her huge Crown Graphic camera and all the necessary auxiliary equipment on any project that promises fair shooting.

She has shared her knowledge and contagious enthusiasm with the high school division of the camera club by teaching an introductory course in photography with planned field trips for practical shooting experience. Each season she encourages the members to make their own Christmas cards and gives unstinting help in planning the designs and working out technical problems. To a few advanced members she has extended limited darkroom privileges.

The photo-fly stung Mrs. Sturdivant while she was studying business methods at a school in Philadelphia. Her roommate was attending photography school and set up a make-shift darkroom in their clothes closet. "It was very inconvenient," Mrs. Sturdivant recalls, "But her enthusiasm was catching. Helping her was fun!"

Back home in El Dorado, Mrs. Sturdivant began her second career—as a business woman, with a growing hobby interest in camera art. "I started with a simple folding German camera, a war memento gift from a friend, and a portable darkroom set-up in the apartment kitchen," she recalls.

With experience and experiment whetting her interest she enrolled for a correspondence course in photography from the University of Nebraska. Piece by piece she collected equipment and by diploma-time had outfitted a basement darkroom.

"MY FIRST photographic. Christmas card was the familiar printed mat with the picture inserted, but it was dull," she acknowledges. Christmas, 1948, she experimented with a card showing a section of a Christmas tree, with her family (her mother, her husband and herself) posed among the boughs, attaching tree decorations.

Friends from everywhere commented, complimented and deluged her with requests for personalized greeting cards. Each year she receives requests that she is unable to fill from friends and strangers who have received an "original" that she has made. "Some of these I would enjoy doing—especially those with clever design ideas, like that of a magician in Texarkana who wanted to place an order," she says. "But it is impractical to design cards for customers in distant towns."

Because each separate design is a project in itself, she accepts orders for only six or eight cards each season. Much of her work is repeat business, which she enjoys because of the challenge to her originality.

To allow a margin of profit she has established a fixed charge of $5 for designing and creating the negative, with cards at $3 a dozen and a minimum order of four dozen. Most customers order five or six dozen. "The simplest design costs me at least $5 in materials," she explains. "My profit depends upon the number of cards ordered of each design. From $100 to $150 each season in money, and untallied enjoyment of friendship and fun is reward enough for my time."

ORIGINAL DESIGNS come easily for Mrs. Sturdivant. Each Yule season she views the shop windows over the city and when a display sparks an idea she photographs it (with the proprietor's permission), thus building a file of usable backgrounds for future cards. If a customer offers no logical theme for his design, Mrs. Sturdivant supplies one from her files, or she arranges a set-up display with props of trees, miniature houses, cotton for snow and other Christmas decorations from the dime store.

But, if possible, she features the customer's hobby, business, pets, children or other special interests. For example, last year for the James E. Pences she created a "book-ends" card featuring his profession, selling, and her hobby, freelance writing.

"I made an engagement with the Pences to take the family pictures in their home," Mrs. Sturdivant relates. "I prefer to work out the design with the customer to insure satisfaction with the results." The finished card must be completely planned before any pictures are made. The members of the family must be posed in the "pre-shots" (photographs to be used in the set-up) to fit their position on the Christmas card. This is a very important detail in the planning, and sometimes, working out the correct pose taxes the imagination, since props are often required. An error at this point could damage the effect of the finished card, or necessitate a complete change of design.

THREE "PRE-SHOTS" were necessary for the Pences' card. Mr. and Mrs. Pence (Jimmie and Akers) were posed back-to-back upon the floor. (The background is not important since it is cut away.) The older child (James Akers) sat cross-legged upon the floor for his picture, and the baby (Marilela) was placed upon her tummy atop a small chest. (Improper perspective might have resulted from taking her picture in that position upon the floor, since, in the finished card, she was placed high upon the widest prop.)

For the pre-shots Mrs. Sturdivant used a 4-by-5 Crown Graphic camera with flash attachment. (To make enlarging more accurate each family shot should be made at the same distance from the camera so the individuals will be in proportionate size.) When she had developed the film Mrs. Sturdivant printed 8-by-10 enlargements of each figure on dull finish, double weight paper. These she cut out with scissors like paper dolls, leaving a large tab at the bottom to fold back as a base for standing.

TO ARRANGE the set-up for the final photograph Mrs. Sturdivant used a card table covered with a white blanket (any soft-finish, plain cover would serve). With black India ink on a sheet of white bond paper she lettered the Christmas greeting as a book title and the senders' names as authors. This paper formed a dust-jacket for a thick book, which she flanked with two books on salesmanship and two on creative writing. A band of Scotch tape held these props compactly together upon the table. She placed the paper-doll cut-outs of the family in position and secured them with Scotch tape at the back out of camera view. The edge of the blanket was turned up and fastened behind the set-up as a background.

For photographing the set-up Mrs. Sturdivant mounted the camera on a tripod at a distance of three feet, directly in front of and even with the arrangement. For lighting she used two No. 2 photo floods at the same height as the camera, one on each side. The lights were placed approximately three feet out from the corners of the table (on an imaginary line from the center of the table, bisecting the corners) and each was "aimed" at the opposite corner for cross lighting. Reflection from objects in the set-up might result if the light was directed from the camera onto the arrangement.

Mrs. Sturdivant focused the set-up on the ground glass at three feet, to get close enough to exclude from the camera's field of vision everything except the arrangement. The 4-by-5 contact prints were to be the greeting cards and she wanted nothing to appear on the negative that was not wanted on the finished card. She set the lens opening on f22 and the shutter speed at 1/10 of a second. A slow shutter speed with a small lens opening is necessary for perfect focus of each detail in the arrangement when shot at such close range.

A HOBBYIST with less expensive equipment, a simple box camera, for instance, could photograph the set-up either by the open-flash method (open the shutter—flash the bulb—close the shutter) or by detaching the flash gun and having an assistant hold it above and slightly in front of the arrangement. Since the distance from the lens to the subject would be five to seven feet with a fixed focus camera, the field of vision would include more than the arrangement itself. Therefore, contact prints could not be used for the final card. Each card would have to be enlarged to 4-by-5 (or any other desired size) masking off the unnecessary area around the set-up.

From the Pences' developed negative Mrs. Sturdivant printed the finished card. She made contact prints on double weight, dull finish paper which she buys in 4-by-5 deckle-edged sheets, with matching envelopes.

This photographing technique is routine for Mrs. Sturdivant's work, with variations in lens opening and shutter speeds for different sizes of set-ups to be photographed. Most of her "originals" are made by the explained set-up method.

For the Bert Shyrocks' "gift package" card, Mrs. Sturdivant covered the card table with Christmas wrapping paper and used a stack of beribboned boxes for props upon which the paper doll cut-outs of the family were arranged. The greeting and the sender's name is the familiar sticker-type package trimming from the dime store.

The "roadside sign" card for the Michael Kiskos was set up on a table covered with cotton to simulate snow. The sign was made of two small strips of wood tacked to a white cardboard upon which Mrs. Sturdivant stenciled the greeting and name. The miniature tree and the cluster of bells and ribbon were dime store props and Mrs. Sturdivant fashioned the snowman of cotton with features dotted on in India ink. Two easily posed pre-shots were made for this arrangement.

AN EXAMPLE of a simpler method is the attractive "telephone" card of the William H. Powells. Photographs of each member of the family were pasted behind torn-out holes in a sheet of heavy paper upon which the Christmas message was written. A picture was taken of the "paste-up" (a practically flat surface to be photographed, without three dimensional props). When faces are large enough to be easily recognized, lettering the sender's name is unnecessary.

Illustrating Mrs. Sturdivant's use of her file of shop-window photographs, is the "sleigh" card she made for the Bert Shyrocks for another Christmas. The picture of Santa in his reindeer-drawn sleigh had been made the season before, and filed. Mrs. Sturdivant enlarged each figure in the photograph and cut out each one with scissors. Three pre-shots of the Shyrocks were made in the proper poses, enlarged, cut out paper-doll fashion, and placed in position—in the sleigh and astride the reindeer. This complete cut-out was then pasted upon a black background. The little house (constructed of paper), the tree and cotton snowman were placed a few inches in front of the background on the cotton-covered table. The photograph was taken of this combined paste-up and set-up. With India ink the reins, whip, smoke and lettering were done on the back (shiny side) of the negative before the cards were printed. (This could have been done, perhaps easier, with white ink on the background.)

SOME OF Mrs. Sturdivant's ideas in-the-making for the future are: a family building a new home, posing the members "at work" on the miniature model of the house built from a kit; a newspaper reporter featuring the masthead of the newspaper with the greeting as headlines and the name of the sender as by-line; a writer's family posed on a typewriter with the name and address of the sender as the letterhead and the season's greeting typed out on the paper in the machine.

THERE IS no end to the fund of experimenting with photographic Christmas cards," Mrs. Sturdivant asserts. "And the procedure could be adapted to creating any number of other types of cards—birth announcements, get-well cards, gift enclosures, birthday greetings, party invitations of all kinds; your imagination is the limit!"