Creating a Calendar
Text and Photography Copyright Dave Uhlig - All rights reserved.
A calendar you say! I would love to put those great big pictures of my fabulous
photographs in a twelve-image calendar for all the folks to buy. That is the thought
that most photographers have when November and December come around and all the
cool landscape and puppy dog calendars for the next year come out. Actually getting
from taking great images to having someone hang your work in their kitchen can be
a lot harder than it appears. Fellow fire fighter Pete Phillips and I are in charge
of getting 1000-1200 calendars published and ready to roll every year. I thought
a little insight into how we get this accomplished would be some great information
for everyone here!
Pete and I are co-editors of The Inferno, a bi-monthly publication produced by the
International Firefighters Union, Local 385. We have a circulation of around 1500.
With this responsibility comes the task of producing a raffle calendar every year.
When Pete and I took over the editorial responsibilities two years ago, the calendar
was very basic: one image with tear off sheets stapled below for each of the twelve
months. With me handling all the photographic duties of our magazine, I figured
a twelve-image flip thru calendar was the direction we needed to go.
One of the first major obstacles we have had to overcome is monetary. Producing
the twelve-image calendar meant raising the printing costs from around $1000.00
to over $4000.00! I almost fell out of my chair when we got the initial bid back
from the printing company. How were we going to come up with the funds to get this
thing printed? Sponsors. I put together a three ring binder with all the images
we intended to use, and started knocking on doors. We got very lucky in the fact
that ING Financial is a major player in our retirement, and they were willing to
pick up the tab. With that hurdle accomplished, it was on to actually putting this
thing together.
Our next step was tweaking our software to work in a calendar format. We currently
use a fairly old version of Quark Express 4.0 to print our magazine. We figured
this could work for building the calendar. With help from our publisher, we went
about configuring the calendar from scratch. This included building the months with
the days in the boxes, to inputting the sponsors' logos, and adding the images.
This was a monumental task! We put it all together: every line and every piece of
artwork. I thought I could just take some cool photos and throw them on some paper!
Things don't usually work out that easy. The great thing about setting up the calendar
from scratch, is that we now have the template saved. This year it took about a
quarter of the time to put it all together. We had to do the obvious date changes,
but aside from the change in images, pretty much everything else stayed the same.
There were some complaints last year that there weren't enough fire and action images
in the calendar. I underestimated my audience and went for a more, "touchy, feel
good", calendar last year. Most of the people on the job screamed, "we want flames
and action!" I was lucky this year to have covered some great fires, and the new
images should be a big improvement.
This brings up a great point; know your audience. The photographic industry is inundated
with beautiful landscape and flower calendars. Will your work stand out from all
the great stuff being captured already? And, who is going to purchase what you are
shooting? I came to realize that my customers are mainly firefighters and their
families, and have attempted to make the images fit what they want to buy.
This is a huge point that I think a lot of photographers underestimate and lose
sight of. 'Who is going to purchase my work?' should be a driving question while
you are out shooting if you want to make any money in this business. I will pass
up taking pictures sometimes simply for that reason. I may see a beautiful sunset,
but if I don't believe I have an audience for that particular image, is it worth
stopping the car and making my family wait while I snap away? If photography is
purely a hobby, then by all means, stop the car and make the family wait!
I hope some of this information will help folks see what it takes to put a product
together that people will actually buy. I have included the images for this year's
calendar. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I never imaged that Pete
and I would be in charge of such a monster. But after doing this once already, we
seem to be on the right track, and profits are scheduled to be up this year! I guess
that is about all you can ask for.
About the Author
Dave Uhlig is a staff member of TPN, and more of his work can be seen on his website,
Photo Omaha.
Comments on TPN travel photography articles? Please feel free to send them
to editor@travelphotographers.net.
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