My son and I were on the hunt last week for Pokemon cards and stopped by our local Target (no luck) but we decided to grab a couple of packs of Allen & Ginter baseball hanger packs.
We got the random mix of cards including an x-ray of a frog. One card did catch my attention though. It was a Yu Darvish base set card. It's not worth much money-wise, maybe a dollar on a good day. What made it catch my attention was that the photo they used looked like it was from the annual photo day the teams hold during spring training. I'm a freelance photographer for Getty Images and back in 2022 I was fortunate enough to get called in to work photo day (the regulars were all over covering the Winter Olympics) and one of the three teams I got assigned was the San Diego Padres. I did a quick search on the Getty archive and sure enough the photo used for this card was one I took! (After a quick eBay search it turns out the 2023 Allen & Ginter Yu Darvish card is also my photo).
For the most part photographers don't get notified if/when one of our photos gets used on a card, it's more of a "Hey, that photo kinda looks familiar" kind of thing and then we start digging through our archives. Since most of my work is small market mid-major college football and basketball, my photos don't generally make it onto sports cards. So to randomly pull a card with my photo on it (and having no prior knowledge that it had been used) made my week and it's also cool to be able to tell my son that one of the cards in the pack is one of my photos.
