Annual landscape photography calendar

The end of the year comes with enthusiasm when you have to go through the best images of the entire year and choose the most appropriate ones to add to your calendar. There are some simple but important steps when creating your landscape photography calendar that we would like to share with you:

First step is to go and search for the calendar format that you would like to use. 

Last year we focused more on the usefulness of the calendar for the people we will be giving it to. But I often noticed that people keep our calendar backwards, where the image is bigger and they can fully enjoy the landscapes every month, in detriment of the actual months being displayed. 

 

So this year we decided to choose a format that is more focused on the images and will be used as a monthly desk picture,  showing the days of the month on the same page.

January 2019 Calendar

Choose best images for your calendar format and for the month of the year.

We don’t like changing the crop of our images (the crop was a deliberate compositional decision at the shutter pressing moment or in post processing) for the sake of having a certain image displayed in our calendar.  Also, we want the image to reflect the mood of the month when it is displayed.

Romania has 4 seasons and, for example, for January we want to see a snowy image that would bring my thoughts to the coldness and great beauty of the winter season and same for June, I want to see the charm of the summer months. I know this might not be important for some people, but I do believe in the power of images to wake up feelings in people that are looking at them them. Still, this remains a personal option.

Find a good and cheap option to print the calendar, so you can afford doing more copies.

As you should well know, photography is a passion for us, so we do not make any money on doing what we love. Annual calendars are things we do not pay from photography and they are not for sale, we give them for free to the persons that, as we know, appreciate our work. So cost is an important aspect for us.

To reduce costs we decided to focus on two points:

• First step was to find a place to print our calendars with a good resolution, a good paper, but not very expensive. For this we requested multiple quotes from printing companies, until we found an option that was decent in price and quality.
• Second, we decided to make the calendar with 6 pages print face and reverse + cover, instead of 12 pages + cover. This seems ok cost wise (it reduced the cost by 25%) but also environmentally wise, as we do not waste too much paper.

Always do some extra copies

We have learned from the last year experience that it’s always good to have some extra copies from your yearly calendar. You can always find people interested in your work that are happy to have a copy of your calendar on their desk, it simply makes their days happier. So we always make 10 more extra copies to have as they year passes by.

Have you thought about building your landscape photography calendar? We would love to hear your thoughts and challenges in the comments below.