Photo Calendars the right way

I love giving creative Christmas gifts. It’s just so much more fun than buying something off the shelf.

I’ve lost count, but I believe 2007 marks the ninth year that I’ve created photo calendars for my family. Every year I scare them by telling them that I just didn’t make enough photos this year to come up with a good calendar. They never take me seriously and I have always managed to put thirteen photos (one for each month and one for the cover) from the year gone by into a calendar that they can enjoy until the next year.

Back when I started doing this, there were no online photo services and very few digital cameras, if any. The first two or three calendars were made by Kinkos. I would label the photos by the month and they would make color enlargements and laminate the photos and the calendar pages and assemble the calendars. Then as inkjets and scanners improved I started scanning my 35mm prints and printing my own enlargements for the calendars. I even did my own assembly by borrowing some time on the laminating machine and binder at my work. That was less costly, but needless to say the quality suffered.

This year I had plenty of photos. As you’ve noticed I have also been experimenting with Flickr and photo sharing online. My favorite online photo sharing and backup site has become Phanfare. More about them later. On Phanfare they give links to order prints, etc. One of the companies they use for printing is Shutterfly.

If you sign up with Shutterfly, they give you 10 free 4×6 prints to try out their service. I ordered my 10 prints right away so I could get an idea of their quality. If the prints were good then I wanted to give them a shot on this year’s calendar. I placed the order for the 10 prints and got them back in about a week. They looked great! I got busy right away uploading my calendar photos. I was able to choose special borders and even put in custom dates for the birhdays and anniversaries in our family.

My 2008 calendars arrived yesterday and I was beyond pleased! They did in fact look exactly like the Shutterfly previews, custom dates and all. No silly lamination here. The pages are heavy card stock with a nice white spiral binding and the photo results were of the highest quality. I like doing things myself, but there’s no way I could get this kind of quality doing the calendars myself. I can’t wait to see the reaction this Christmas eve!

If you’re looking for a printer, especially for calendars, I highly recommend Shutterfly.

Merry Christmas!

Brett