Category Archives: Calendar

Black & White, Calendar, Iowa State, Jay, Jesse, Nader, Self-Portrait, Shannon, Vest

January

The 2009 Photography 139 Calendar went through quite a large metamorphosis this year. I wasn’t sure that I was going to produce a calendar this year. The amount of time involved in the designing, printing, laminating and binding the calendar was becoming a burden on me and my friends. I can’t even count how many hours last year Jesse, Jay and Nader put in to making these calendars.

This year I outsourced the printing of the calendar. This was much harder for me to do than one might suspect. I think I don’t necessarily give the outward appearance of being a control freak, but I do have things in my life where compromise is not to be considered.

Once I was able to talk myself into outsourcing the printing, everything else sort of fell into place. The amount of time put into the calendar this year by me and my friends was only a couple of hours. Most of the time was actually spent in designing the calendar. Jesse and Jay were not even bothered at all.

I can thank Mike Vest for being my liaison between me and my printer. He also punched every hole in the calendars for hanging. I also need to thank Shannon for binding all of the calendars.

I have yet to distribute all of the calendars, but I would like to beginning sharing the pictures that I selected for the 2009 calendar.

Below is the picture for January.



This is the only picture in the calendar that wasn’t taken in 2008. This self-portrait was taken late in 2007. The location of this picture was the Campanile on the Iowa State University campus.

Calendar, Work

Curious

So I’ve begun the task of creating the Photography 139 calendar. I printed out a few test images and hung them on my wall at the mine. I took some sticky notes and numbered them 1 through 12. Then I thought about my very general rules for selecting pictures to go with certain months and began placing the sticky notes on the pictures to indicate what month they could represent. After changing my mind and the order of the pictures I felt that I had a pretty fair idea about where each picture was going to go and what pictures had been eliminated from contention. I finished this part of the process on Monday.

I left my rough outline up on my wall. It hung there unmolested.

I left work on Wednesday at about 6:15.

I came into work this morning about 9 am.

The pictures were still there. The sticky notes were gone! I mean, really?

At this time I’m just going to chalk this up as just another one of the incredibly stupid things that our cleaning crew has done and I have put the sticky notes back up.


11-23-07
New Sticky Notes

Me and my two maybe three man crew hope to have the grand majority of calendars churned out on this Saturday. If you would like to order a 2008 Calendar, you may e-mail the address below:


Christopher D. Bennett

The price is a little bit different this year, but if you have ordered calendars in the past, you have been “Grandfather Claused” in at the old rate.

Calendar

A First Endorsement

I wish to begin with a quote by Henry Ward Beecher:

The overweening self respect of conceited men relieves others from the duty of respecting them at all.

Perhaps you don’t understand why now, but you will understand soon enough. You see my first endorsement is of myself. Well not exactly myself, but of the Photography 139 Calendar. I even have photographic evidence to back up my claim that I think very highly of my own calendar.
 




 

What can I say? It is a good product. Let me just tell you a little bit about its production. I started by taking a gander at the thousands of images that I have made in the past year. Then I eliminate all the fluff and filler and distill the essence of my photographic vision down to 13 images. 1 picture for the front cover and 12 for the monthly images.

Then I adjust and crop the images so that they will print with the proper dimensions and spatial relationships. I also combine 12 of the images into 1 image for the back cover.

Once the images are ready to be printed, I begin creating the actual monthly pages. The useful part of the calendar. Generating the calendars is easy enough, but then I check various websites, astronomical charts, and other calendars to get all of the most important days on their proper dates. Thankfully “Squirrel Appreciation Day” is always the same day every year.

After all the files are ready to go, it is time for the printing. This year we used two separate printers, although they both are HP printers that use their Vivera print cartridges. This year the images were printed on Staples brand premium matte photo paper and the calendar pages were printed on stock card.

Once everything is printed, the pages are sorted so that they are placed back to back with its mate in the proper orientation. I usually accomplish this task, but sometimes a small Italian man helps me.

Then the calendars are off to the 2nd part of this 2 man operation. Jesse is that second man. He fires up the Royal Sovereign laminator and all of the pages are laminated. This process can take up to 10 runs through the Royal Sovereign to guarantee the best seal.

After the lamination, the calendar pages are taken to the comb binding machine to have holes punch in the top and then bound with a comb binder. This year the comb binders were white. In the future I think we will branch out in a more colorful direction. It is the promoter in me.

Now that the Photography 139 calendar is bound, it comes back to me where I man a modified 3 hole puncher that places a hole in darn near the exact middle of the top of the calendar so that it can be hung up on the wall and is ready for display.

Then I either hand deliver the calendar to your home, place of employment, or talk you into coming to see me at work.

How good is this calendar? I know that it is hanging up on walls as far north as Mendota Heights, Minnesota and as far south as Fairview, Kansas. It is proudly displayed in the work areas of employees at the Younkers Salon, Principal Financial, Ortho Computer Systems, and Atlas Media Group.

This calendar is so good that people have asked for the mistake pages. Begging for my scraps. This calendar is so good that a very mild acqaintance got in my face about how “I could be making money off of this!!”

I hope you got one because I have some sad news. When I walked into the Photography 139 Print Shop in the calendar wing, I found the following sign posted next to the water cooler:


2007 Photography 139 Calendar - Sold Out