Creating a Calendar
Gone are the days when producing an annual calendar could provide a healthy portion of a budding photographers income (with a few exceptions - I suspect the YouTube superstars are probably selling in the many 1000’s). I remember hearing a talk by Colin Prior many years ago where he reminisced about being flown first class around the world by British Airways in order to capture 12 calendar worthy images to adorn their annual corporate calendar. Just imagine!
Nowadays, the market is both heavily saturated and under-priced, and my own experiences of producing and selling a yearly calendar have proven to be somewhat frustrating as well as a valuable learning experience. I thought I’d share some of these learnings alongside the design and production process of my 2027 calendar. If you like what you see, please consider ordering the Calendar right here on the website or drop by the Gallery if you happen to be in Lochcarron to pick up a copy.
Background
For 2025 and 2026 I produced a calendar alongside Alex Nail. I’m very thankful to Alex for asking me to collaborate - not only did it provide me with some confidence boosting validation, it meant I could share the risks and challenges in producing a calendar whilst learning a great deal from a fully confessed perfectionist who doesn’t compromise on quality and who shares many of the same ethics around how and what to shoot in the Northwest Highlands.
The 2025 Calendar was my first and proved to be a great success - I sold 300 copies through the gallery and online and it provided a much needed income stream whilst I was still finding my feet as a gallery owner.
A few from the 2025 and 2026 Calendars - all images I’m really happy with and chosen to highlight the changing weathers and colours of the Northwest Highlands throughout the seasons.
2026 was a much bigger challenge. Despite producing a calendar I was immensely proud of, gallery sales did not materialise in the same numbers and I was left with 75 calendars unsold at the end of the year. Whilst some of this was due to customers shifting their support of my work into other areas (print sales had more than doubled year on year), I cannot help but think that other factors were at play, which brings me to some of the challenges of selling a calendar in the current market.
The market is saturated
It has never been easier to produce and sell a calendar. There are many fantastic photographers out there who have no desire to make a living from their hobby but recognise calendar sales as a way of gaining recognition and validation for the hard work they put into making images they are proud of. Selling a physical product is worth a 1000 likes on Instagram - it’s a great feeling! And the number of people producing calendars seems to go up every year, to the point where some of the retail outlets I’ve approached to sell my calendar simply don’t have the space or demand to justify adding to their existing offerings.
Costs are up, prices are down
Photography is a significant part of my income and I need to make a profit. The confidence boosting feeling of making a sale certainly hasn’t worn off, but the reality is everything I produce and sell has to pay its way. The Highlands is awash with mass produced, poor quality calendars showcasing the same images of castles and cows year after year, and I’ll never be able to compete with a price point under £10, nor would I want to - My aim is to produce a unique, high quality product showcasing my own vision as a photographer of the Highlands throughout the seasons. However, it is a fact that the availability and proclivity of under-priced ‘tat’ only serves to undermine photography as a whole and that a £20 price point might seem expensive in comparison. Indeed, those 75 Calendars I had left at the end of the year all sold out when they were begrudgingly discounted to half price.
Individual needs are paramount
One benefit/challenge of running a physical gallery is that you get to hear direct, honest and occasionally brutal feedback! And many times the feedback of one customer directly contradicts the feedback of another, sometimes within the same day. Over the last few years my calendar has been both too big and too small. Many people have asked for a calendar in the exact dimensions of their display space. Some people see the images as incidental to the dates whereas others would be happy without any space in which to write appointments and reminders. You simply cannot please everyone and the massive availability of other formats means you undoubtedly lose sales regardless of whether the prospective customer likes the images or not.
Is it worth it?
With these challenges in mind, I had some thinking to do before committing to producing a 2027 calendar, not least because Alex and I had decided to go our separate ways. Not only would I be significantly lowering my order quantities, I’d also be committing to undertaking the design and layout elements of the process myself, something I’d never done before.
In the end I weighed up the options and decided to go ahead, and I’m glad I did. Ultimately, a few factors made me decide to put in the work despite knowing that the revenue generated would be the smallest aspect of my gallery business for the year -
Customer loyalty
I’m very lucky to have a number of customers that have purchased the calendar in previous years and make a special effort to support my work. I did not want to disappoint these customers by no longer producing a calendar.
Learning new skills
Alex had always taken control of the layout and design elements of the process. I felt like this was a great opportunity to learn some new skills and create the design for something that is relatively simple and formulaic. These skills could be put to good use should I ever decide to produce a book.
Showcasing new work
I have no interest in milking my back catalogue and producing reproductions of the same images year in, year out. Photography is a passion - I love to be out in the field making new work. Producing a yearly calendar means I have to create 12 images I’m proud of in any given year, and this provides some much needed motivation to get out and shoot even when I don’t really fancy it.
It’s accessible
As I’ve already mentioned, it’s a great feeling when someone likes your work enough to buy it and display it in their home. Calendars provide an accessible and affordable option for customers who might not have the space or budget to invest in a one off print.
My thoughts on Image Selection and Design
So with the decision made, my thoughts turned to image selection and the design. The fun part!
The biggest lesson I’d learnt from working with Alex was to shoot throughout the year with the calendar in mind. This meant capturing image variations in the correct format and aspect ratio and being mindful of which scenes would work well when presented alongside one another. Oftentimes this just meant tweaking a composition and shooting a slightly different variant of the same scene to make sure it would work in a 4:5 aspect ratio, which I had decided to maintain as my preferred image format for the next calendar.
I was keen to broaden the scope of the calendar to include the Islands - not least because I had a huge body of work to draw on from Harris and Lewis and because I knew that including some images from Skye would increase my customer base. Many of visitors to the Gallery are on their way to or from the Misty Isle, and I knew from print sales that images of the Islands really resonate with customers. With this in mind, I made an effort to shoot some well known locations on Skye, and include these alongside some more unique and harder won viewpoints.
I ended up with a shortlist of around 25 images. Now came the hard part, and I created some common-sense rules I could apply to this selection to further reduce the options -
I would differentiate the image selection from those used in my previous calendars. On the best photography days it’s possible to get multiple keepers from the same location - I wanted to create a unique set of 12 images, rather than include variants of the same scene from prior years.
The same location would not be used twice. I thoroughly enjoy shooting the same compositions throughout all seasons, in the interests of representing as wider variety of locations as possible, I would not include the same location twice even if the images themselves looked completely different.
I would embrace the variety of landscape that Scotland had to offer. Given Alex’s background, mountain scenes had dominated our previous calendars. Whilst I have a deep passion for the mountains, I aIso love shooting beaches, seascapes and woodland and I was keen to include a balanced selection that represented the huge variation of subjects that makes Scotland such a rewarding place to photograph
Each image had to represent the season, including subtle changes in the predominant colour pallet of the shoulder months. Heather peaks in August, frost is as much a representation of winter as snow and the saturated greens of summer only truly last through June and July. I’m very lucky to live and work in the Highlands and to photograph this stunning landscape all year round. So it was important to me to transition through the cold blues of winter through the vibrant greens of summer and into the yellows and oranges of autumn, and include images that gave a nod to the subtle changes in scenery from one month to the next.
By far the best part of collaborating with someone else had been the process of sharing and selecting images and then and whittling this selection down to the final 12. Alex is certainly not shy when it comes to providing critique and this process had always proved necessary to ensure we ended up with a balanced and high quality final product. I knew I would need a trusted and trained eye to help me with my final selection and I shared some drafts with my good friend Matt Fischer for his feedback. His guidance was very helpful and very much appreciated, and I made a number of changes based on his advice.
The final and most time consuming part was the design itself. Whilst I could have used one of the standard templates provided by my chosen printer, I knew that I wanted to maintain full creative control and that my desire for a unique product would outweigh the ease and speed of an ‘off the shelf’ solution.
Despite feedback from some visitors to the gallery, I’d always felt the size and layout of our previous calendars had provided a good balance between image size and space for people to list appointments and reminders. I also knew that loyal customers would want a calendar in the same size as previous years. I decided to maintain the overall size and layout, and make some changes to fonts and the colour pallet from one month to the next. I also removed reference to UK based bank holidays on the basis that many of my customers are international.
I used Affinity Pro design software and I was very impressed with how intuitive and easy to use it was. It was also free to use! Overall it was a fun process and it has definitely removed some of the anxieties I had about creating something from scratch. I’ll definitely be using this software again for future projects.
The final job was the easiest part of the whole process - handing my files off to the printers and waiting for the final product to land at the Gallery. Once again, I used Johnsons Printers based in Nantwich here in the UK. I knew from past experience that their knowledge, friendly customer service and attention to detail would guarantee a finished product which exceeded my desire for quality and consistency. Johnsons print my greeting cards so the colour conversion process is second nature to me now, and the whole process was as seamless as expected. Within a few weeks the Calendar was printed, spiral bound and retail ready - I can highly recommend Johnsons and it’s no surprise to me that they are the printer of choice for some of the very best calendars available in the UK today.
Final thoughts
I’m really pleased with how this year’s calendar has turned out and overall I’m very glad I decided to put the time and effort into creating something I am very proud to sell.
The calendar has been available in the gallery and online since early June, and once again its proven to be a challenging year converting the compliments and positive feedback into sales. Again, general print sales have grown significantly this year and I suspect many people are choosing to support my work through purchasing small prints rather than the calendar. I’m certainly not complaining as the gallery in general continues to go from strength to strength. Sales always pick up as we enter the final few months of the year, and I’m confident that I’ll sell out this year, not least because I only printed 150 copies.
With that in mind, now is the perfect time to order the calendar if you’ve been thinking of picking up a copy! I won’t be doing another print run, so now is your chance to get a copy before they run out. Thanks as ever for supporting my work.