Four years ago, Lois Bowlus and a few of her family members were putting up Christmas decorations when she sat her 3-year-old granddaughter, Amber Boyett, down on the sofa with a string of lights and grabbed her new Minolta camera.

“I took Amber’s picture on the couch in my living room,” said Bowlus, who lives outside Pemberville. “It was in the evening and we were trimming the Christmas tree. It was one of the first pictures I took with a digital camera. I (later) Photoshopped it to look like a watercolor painting. It made the lights glow even more than it did in the photograph.”

Amber is 7 now, and the photo Bowlus took of the little girl that night now adorns a Hallmark Christmas card.

Bowlus, 54, has always been sort of a photography nut. She’s attended photography workshops in Montana on a couple of occasions, and she has taken photography classes at the Toledo Museum of Art. Still, she said, something was missing.

“I wanted to get better at photography,” Bowlus said. “I just wasn’t learning in-depth like I wanted to. I wanted to be more grounded in what I was doing and more confident in what I was doing. I thought an academic setting would be better, because it would push me more.”

Lois Bowlus was notified that her card was selected to be featured in Hallmark stores around the country during the holiday season. (Press photo by Ken Grosjean)

Bowlus enrolled in a photography class at Owens Community College in January 2009. She’s still taking classes at Owens in pursuit of a certificate in commercial photography.” It’s a professional certification,” Bowlus said. “At the time I started, Owens didn’t have a two-year degree in commercial photography. Now they do, but I don’t think I’m going to go for that one. I’m just enjoying taking the classes and learning as much as I can. Getting the certificate will be the icing on the cake, but I’m just enjoying the process right now.”

Bowlus, who has five children between the ages of 13 and 32 as well as two grandchildren, is a part-time attorney for Judge Thomas Osowick in the Sixth District Court of Appeals in Toledo.”

I do research and writing,” Bowlus said. “I went to law school when I was 34 and finished when I was 37, and that was enough (school) for me. I went to the University of Toledo and graduated in 1993. I had a baby about two weeks before I found out I passed the bar exam.”

Bowlus entered a Hallmark contest last May, after her daughter, Allison, 22, gave her a Mother’s Day card that featured a winning entry from a previous Hallmark contest.

“They run a contest every couple months,” Bowlus said. “The contest I entered was ‘That Says Christmas.’ The Mother’s Day card happened to be one of the winners of a contest, and I turned the card over and got the website.”

The Hallmark contest asks contestants to submit a photo and write a caption to go with the card. “They want you to use certain words, too, and one of the words was ‘wish,’” Bowlus said. “I titled my picture ‘A Christmas Wish,’ and I wrote the verse inside (“May the light of the world bring you peace this Christmas and always”).

“You had to have the whole thing to win the contest. You couldn’t just have the picture. It was just something I wanted to say, and it went with the picture,” she said. “It had the word ‘light’ in it and there are lights on the (card) cover. It was a good Christmas message.”

The photo shows Amber looking closely at an arrangement of Christmas lights. Bowlus submitted her contest photo and caption in late May, and she received a response from Hallmark a few weeks later.

“They told me the first week of July that it was chosen as an e-card on their website,” Bowlus said. “At that point, I got $250. I was really thrilled. I wanted it to be in stores, but I was thrilled it made it that far. At the end of August, they notified 10 of us that the cards would be in stores, and we each got another $250.

“I thought it was a great card. I liked what it said and I’ve always liked that picture,” she said. “It just seemed to be something they would like. I wasn’t surprised they liked it, but I was happy and thrilled that a commercial company would pick it.”

The Christmas card went into stores the second week of November, Bowlus said, adding that Werner’s Hallmark store in Perrysburg is currently carrying her card.

“That’s the only store I know for sure,” she said. “Not every Hallmark store carries every Hallmark card. Werner’s bought some extra ones.”

The winning entry and the classes she has been taking at Owens have inspired Bowlus to delve even further into a career in professional photography. “I think I’m looking at a second-career situation, at least part-time in the future,” she said. “I already have a part-time job and kids at home, but I would like to participate in that professional world. I go to professional workshops and I have professional photographer friends.

“I’m kind of working myself in that direction, but I don’t want to give up being a lawyer just yet,” she said. “It’s the old, ‘don’t give up your day job’ thing.”

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