Creating a Calendar
Well, it’s what photographers do, create calendars! I gave it a go with my ever-present maxim of ‘how hard can it be?’ As it turns out ‘pretty hard’…. and a little frustrating Taking the images is the simple bit, well for me anyway as I am a photographer, albeit for a village-based calendar like mine you are somewhat limited to local scenes, so creativity and constant foot pounding is the key! The truth is not all scenes within a small village are attractive, astounding or exciting, so finding the ‘wow’ factor is not so easy.
The end game of course is a season appropriate image for each month, so for example snow pictures need to be December, January, February, Bluebells in April, Poppies in November, you get the idea. I have been taking ‘village pictures’ for two or three years in all seasons, in all months, in all weathers, so when it came to it I had the magic twelve photos.
The next part of the process, given you have 12 pictures, all edited and in month order, is to find a printing company. The issue there is trying to find a print company that are prepared to print at low volumes, the population of my village is around six and a half thousand, so the market is pretty small. You also have to ask yourself who will buy a calendar? Certainly not younger folks who use their phones to keep tabs on dates and events, for sure my market was in the older generation. In the end I ordered a print run of 150 copies, will I sell them all? I hope so as the proceeds go to charity. Something I wasn’t expecting was having to create the calendar pages from scratch, days, months, public holidays etc… Naïvely I thought the print company would have had a template to do this. Fortunately, I have a great mate who had all the skills and knowledge to create the template, thanks to Andy for all his time and expertise.
The other issue was colour integrity, I edited each of the twelve images to make them as attractive as possible, but once you convert them to a print format and test on different papers the colour integrity is generally compromised. Then you end up over brightening and over saturating on your computer screen in the hope it will work on the print paper, it was a game! And not one I enjoy playing, the frustration is palpable.
Once all that was behind me, I had to find sales outlets, which honestly was easy, we have a great village with a strong charitable spirit and I found three outlets, almost without really trying. I created some point-of-sale posters and containers to enable the selling and that was all easy.
So, would I create another calendar in future years? Yes, I certainly would as I now understand the process, the pitfalls and challenges, next time it will be much smoother!