We’ve had lots of colorful clients over the years, but recently one of them enlisted us in quite an elaborate ruse to create a portrait as a gift for her friend. Nancy ordered a portrait of her friend, Lynne’s cat, Karma Martin – but the only pictures she had to submit were tiny like this one. 
She remembered she had taken a picture of Karma recently that was still on the film in her camera and she had high hopes that it would be a great picture for the portrait. However, time was of the essence with Lynne’s birthday approaching at the end of July. Nancy knew that Lynne would have good pictures, since Lynne herself is a web designer who even has a website for the lovely Karma Martin! But Nancy couldn’t figure out a way to ask Lynne for pictures without giving away the surprise – so we offered some subversive assistance.
We suggested that Nancy tell Lynne she heard about a cat photo contest and that the winners would be included in a 2007 calendar, and wouldn’t Karma be a great candidate – she loved the idea! We even went so far as to set up an email account for submissions to our fraudulent photo contest and Lynne fell for it! We got the following email from her the same day:
“I heard about your contest through a friend of a friend. Here are some low-res pics of my cat, Karma, who is a Maine Coon Mix I found at a shelter in NJ. She’s a beauty for sure. These pics don’t do her justice, but you can get a sense of what she looks like. If you like them, I can take hi-res photo for you. http://www.riddlelake.com/karma.html”
So we replied, “Hello Lynne, Karma is gorgeous and looks like quite a character! We would love it if you emailed a couple high res digital images to us, similar to “beautyshot.jpg” where Karma is trying to hypnotize humans. We’re looking for head shots mostly, we need well-focused images with good lighting of course. They can be emailed as .jpg files, the bigger the better (minimum 1 MB) so please set your camera on the highest quality setting. We look forward to receiving your pictures soon – Friday is the deadline for submission! Then we will contact you by the end of July if we will be including Karma in our 2007 Calendar.”
[We thought the “deadline” gave it a nice authentic touch!]
Of course these messages were getting forwarded to Nancy who thought it was just hysterical, and was quite proud of herself for having fooled her friend. Our master plan went awry, however, when Lynne ran into difficulty getting Karma to cooperate, cat’s make lousy models. So we decided that because it was a holiday weekend we could offer a phony extension to our fake contest…
“Hi Lynne, Because a few of our contest “judges” will be taking a long weekend, we will actually not be making our final selections for the calendar until after the holiday. So I thought I would check in with you and see if you thought you could get some high res, close-ups of Karma this weekend? If so, please send them! I just personally think she’s a great candidate for the calendar (so darn cute)!”Â
[We figured a little flattery might do the trick!]
In the meantime, Nancy got her film developed and said she had a priceless picture of Karma so she express mailed it to us, just in case. And it’s a good thing because while Lynne did manage to email us some digital pictures of Karma that weekend which were all very charming, they were also all pretty blurry & a little dark, like this one. 
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the pictures weren’t ideal. Especially since she told me that she had to stop taking pictures before she turned into a “stage mom,” which was priceless. Nancy, on the other hand, hit pay dirt! We were able to scan in the photo she sent and get to work. And while we felt a little guilty about fooling Lynne, Nancy was having a great time with it and got to work herself, making a cat calendar using scotch tape and pictures of Karma! Just kidding, actually Nancy is a talented, senior graphic designer so she designed a lovely calendar that Lynne will be able to use all year, with pictures of Karma and a Buddhist feel to keep up the “karma” theme. She even included the emails that were exchanged during our little deception.  
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She just knew that Lynne was going to love hearing about the lengths we had all gone to for her and Karma.
We certainly hope she’s right about that, because soon the cat will be out of the bag! As long as Lynne loves it, then I’m sure she’ll forgive us for being so sneaky and we won’t have any “bad karma” (pun intended).
P.S. I almost forgot to mention the funniest part of the Karma situation for us, was that the colors Nancy requested for Karma’s portrait were red, gold, and green (just like that popular little song from the 80’s.. Culture Club.. something about a chameleon) =) !
