Making Sports photo trading cards

For many families with young children, the summer sports season is wrapping up.  That also means team and sports photos.  We all want to savor those special moments, and to also share them with friends and family.  I'm no different.  When my oldest wrapped up t-ball this week, I wanted to do something special to preserve those memories.  I'm a bit of an hobbyist photographer and my kids are not surprisingly, my favorite subjects.  They've been trained to not even think anything of having my camera shoved in their faces.  To them, it's as natural as a kid begging for ice cream on a hot day.

I got the idea to turn some photos into trading cards from one of my kid's teammates. They'd ordered some cards through the team photographer, but cheap ass me only ordered a couple of prints, figuring the cards were a gimmick.  When I saw them, I thought they were so cute that I decided to give it a shot to make my own.  (Really, there's no shortage of photos I've taken this season. I'm sure I annoyed the opposing teams plenty by sticking my butt in their faces while trying to get a great action shot.)  I'm fairly savvy with Photoshop so I knew it wasn't going to be too much of a challenge, but when I came across this easy to use template and interface from HP, I figured making it myself from scratch was little more than reinventing the wheel.

So if you have a little one in sports or know of one, give it a whirl.  HP has templates for a wide variety of sports from baseball to basketball, to hockey and more.  Give it a try!  It's free!  All you do is upload the photo, pick your design, type out your text, save it (you might want to format it in Photoshop....I did) and send it to print with your favorite photo finisher.