Show us your 2025 calendars

[Michael Meissner]

It is that time of year when those of us that make calendars do so. Maybe others can share their images as well.

I make a small run of calendars to give as Christmas presents to my family. I always get my calendars printed at mpix.com using pearl paper instead of super glossy, since with pearl paper, you can actually write on it using pencil. My mother-in-law in particular really appreciates having the old school calendar.

I made my calendars yesterday, to take advantage of the Cyber Monday sale at mpix.com (30% off of calendars). The deadline was midnight USA central time, and I finished about 15 minutes before the deadline. I have 8 people getting calendars plus the one we do for the house, so I was going to order 10 calendars I forgot about somebody. It turned out that for 11 calendars the price went down, and it was actually cheaper to order 11 calendars instead of 10.

As I was posting this, the forum asked if this was being discussed in another thread, and it pointed out to the post on calendars I did last year:

• https://www.mu-43.com/threads/calendar-2024.122045/

I am posting images that are down sized for viewing. This downsizing at times will show up as artifacts. I've seen this before, and generally when the full size image is printed, you don't see the artifacts. In particular, the April, May, and August photos have these artifacts.

All of the photos this year were taken with the OM-1 using the following lenses:

• Olympus 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3: January, March, April, May, September, and cover photo
• Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8 + MC-14: February
• Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8: October, November
• Olympus 100-400mm f/5-6.3: June, August
• Olympus 7-14mm f/2.8: July
• Olympus 17mm f/1.2: December

In terms of lens usage, it is surprising that the 12-40mm f/2.8 wasn't used at all. As I've said elsewhere, this year I let G.A.S. go wild, and I upgraded to 4 lenses that have been on my bucket list, along with the MC-14/MC-20. Out of the 13 photos, 7 were taken with these new lenses (the other 6 were taken with the 12-200mm).

January (lion at Disney's Animal Kingdom park):

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February (bird at our feeder):

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March (turtles at a pond along our access road):

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April (our bleeding hearts):

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May (blue flower at the Boston Museum of Science):

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June (cheetah at the Roger Williams zoo):

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July (Groton MA fireworks):

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August (birds at our feeder):

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September (Ayer, MA fall scene):

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October (pumpkins at the Roger Williams zoo):

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November (golden eagle at the Roger Williams zoo):

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December (New England Botanic Garden fairy house):

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Cover photo (Boston skyline shot from Cambridge, MA):

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[DickB]

It is that time of year when those of us that make calendars do so. Maybe others can share their images as well.

Nice! I did it last year and the family liked them, so will do it again this year with these images.

 

[Michael Meissner]

Nice! I did it last year and the family liked them, so will do it again this year with these images.

Nice shots!. Hopefully your family will like them.

During the COVID lock down years (2020 and 2021), my wife and I came to the conclusion that I didn't have enough good shots during the year to make a calendar composed solely of shots taken in that year, so we went back to shots taken in earlier years to make the calendar.

As we entered November, I was beginning to worry whether we had enough shots. In fact, the cover photo of Boston had been taken the day before I uploaded the photos, and the 2 bird shots were taken in mid-November. Some of this is we needed to skip summer trips this year since my wife had had a kidney transplant in April, and we needed to be isolated to prevent her being infected. So it cut down on different things I might have done pictures on.

Back in the distant past, we were having the roof re-done in the November time frame and we were living in Motel 6 for a bit. I didn't have my normal desktop in the hotel room, just a laptop with a small screen. In addition to being challenging to look at the candidate photos (and do editing if desired), at the time for mpix.com you needed to run this windows program to do the upload. I only run Linux on my computers, and I didn't have the laptop setup to do Windows emulation. So I skipped using mpix.com that year, and I had Staples print up the calendars using their normal glossy paper. Man what a difference in quality.

 

[DickB]

I don't hesitate to use photos from prior years, especially late in the year, because I started in early November. I print them myself, as printing is half the fun I get from photography. Last year I designed my own layout, but this year I used a calendar design and Photoshop action from PlayWithYourPixels.com. The price is usually $10, but I got it for free by using Red River paper, a double-sided semi-gloss that worked really well. You can also add your own text, so l personalized them by adding all the family birthdays. Fun to do as well as appreciated gifts.

 

[Michael Meissner]

I don't hesitate to use photos from prior years, especially late in the year, because I started in early November. I print them myself, as printing is half the fun I get from photography. Last year I designed my own layout, but this year I used a calendar design and Photoshop action from PlayWithYourPixels.com. The price is usually $10, but I got it for free by using Red River paper, a double-sided semi-gloss that worked really well. You can also add your own text, so l personalized them by adding all the family birthdays. Fun to do as well as appreciated gifts.

To each their own.

Usually it isn't a problem, as I usually have enough photos to choose from. And the original point was to share the 13 pictures I was proudest of in the last year. But some years, the inspiration runs dry. So far in 2024, I took 2,100 photos. In 2020 and 2021 (the lean years), I 'only' took 900 photos. Since 2002, my average is around 2,800 photos/year.

One year, I actually printed the calendars at home. I didn't directly tally up the costs, but I have to imagine with HP ink costs and good paper, that it is cheaper to just send it out and let the professionals do the job. This includes the cost of doing re-prints because I had some pages where I didn't align the photos correctly when I was printing the 2nd side. It also took something like 2-3 days do the job.

BTW, if anybody else wants to print their calendars in the USA, I see mpix.com has extended their Cyber Monday sale (30% off) through December 5th.

 

[Michael Meissner]

BTW, the calendars came today, and they look lovely. I noticed the pearl paper seemed a little shinny, but I compared it to the current 2024 calendar, and it is the same. Given you can still use it as a paper calendar and update things with pencils, it should not be an issue. It is a lot less shiny than the commercial calendars.

I have the older calendars around somewhere, but I suspect I'm not motivated to search for it to see if the pearl paper has changed over time, since the family likes the feel of the 2024 calendar.

 

[DickB]

I worried about the semi-gloss paper not being good for writing on, but I finally concluded my family wouldn't be writing on it anyway. They all have their "real" calendars on their smartphones! Mine is just for fun, and the photos look a lot better than on matte paper.

 

[Michael Meissner]

I worried about the semi-gloss paper not being good for writing on, but I finally concluded my family wouldn't be writing on it anyway. They all have their "real" calendars on their smartphones! Mine is just for fun, and the photos look a lot better than on matte paper.

In my case my mother-in-law credits my calendar with prolonging her son's life. My mother-in-law is old school and writes everything on the calendar. When my brother-in-law was undergoing cancer treatments, she listed all of his appointments on the calendar. There was a period of time when he was given the wrong meds (or wrong dose), and in going back to the paper calendar, she was able to show the details and get the meds adjusted. It gave my brother-in-law a few more months to live before the cancer killed him.

And I recall the last time I visited my sister and father, both had their calendars marked up.

Me, I tend to use the smartphone calendar, but for vacations and such, I will update the paper calendar.