We could use photos now if not sooner!
Here is a note from Greggers about photo requirements he posted last year.
For funsies, I decided to look back at the previous four or five years I've been in charge of putting together the calendars and posters. We received an average of 20 photos. (That average was thrown off by the year we got 40 photos (more on why that doesn't matter later)). Of those 20, roughly half are typically too low res to be usable. At a time or two, I've reached out for larger versions, and often I either receive smaller versions, or I'm simply told "This is the only version of the photo I have." On average, one photo was taken a long time ago, and it shows. And usually, one is a professional photo. We can't use those. If your photo says, "Blah Blah Photography" and your name isn't Blah Blah, your photo will not be used (and if your name is Blah Blah, please resubmit the photo without the watermark). Sorry, but we simply can't risk getting sued. A lawsuit would end the club. Period.
So after that, by mid-November each year, I end up with seven or eight viable photos. We need 15. Twelve for the months, one for the cover, and two for the platinum and diamond donors certificates. Of those seven or eight, an average of two are vertically oriented. Vertically oriented photos don't work for the calendar, because it's a horizontal thing. Theoretically, one could use multiple vertical shots to create a single horizontal calendar page. But, and I admit this is a personal failing, I simply don't care for calendar collages. If you want a collaged calendar, I encourage you to volunteer to design the calendar every year.
Of the five or six remaining photos, one or two isn't an Alpine. We can debate all day long about whether non-Alpine Rootes vehicles belong in the calendar of a club called "The Sunbeam Alpine Owners Association of America," but most years, we're scrambling for any photos we can get, so I don't discriminate. Well, that's not entirely true. I discriminate against photos with people in them. No offense, you're pretty, but that's not the kind of calendar we're putting together (and I don't want to have to get into model releases and all that). I think of the calendar as a holistic story. Perhaps that's another one of my personal failings, and it's mostly due to the fact that while you consume the calendar one month at a time, as I craft it into the wee hours after working my day job through 12 hour days, I live with it as a whole for a couple of weeks. So it's weird to me to have one photo with people among 11 other photos without.
All of those five or six photos need some level of retouching. Sometimes it's removing oil spots from the driveway (again, my personal preference is not to be reminded that these things often leak like a sieve). Sometimes it's changing the color tone so that the image will look good when printed. Sometimes, I have to remove or recreate parts of the image (see if you can spot the five photos this year that didn't have enough trees, roads, sky, rocks, etc. And see if you can spot the one that used to have a "no littering" sign right in the middle of the photo).
If your photo hasn't been chosen, first check to see if it's too small. Typically a minimum of 1mb is viable. Sometimes higher. Sometimes, and this is a rare sometimes, a photo of smaller byte size can work if there's enough photo there. The calendar photos need to be 11 x 8.5 plus some bleed, preferably at at least 150 dpi. Everything that comes out of your phone comes out at 72 dpi. So, if you do the math, the photo needs to be at least 22 x 17. Sure, these days, most phones put out that physical size or higher. But there are vagaries in all that. For example, one photo was only 256k, but magically it was like 40 inches wide at 72 dpi. So I was able to adjust the physical size down while maintaining the byte size, and the result was a viable photo that was tiny but large. That doesn't always work. The longer I have to work with it to make a photo to make it work, the more it better be a fantastic photo.
And second, if your photo doesn't end up in the calendar, check to see if it's vertically oriented. They don't work. Theoretically, I could crop a vertical photo to make it work in the horizontal calendar. However, if it's too low-res a photo already, it'll be way too low once it's cropped. At the risk of overcomplicating the discussion, say you've got an 8.5 x 11 photo, when it's cropped to 8.5 x 6, it's now not only not the right orientation for the calendar, which needs to be 11 x 8.5. but it's also simply too small. So it needs to be size-adjusted 30% larger in each direction. Take a small photo that's been cropped and adjust its size up and it becomes a muddy mess.
Third, if your photo doesn't end up in the calendar, check to see whether or not it's been used in the past several years. If I get 16 photos and one of them was featured in last year's calendar, guess which one gets the call this year. Now, if you're a gold-level member, you don't get to see the certificates. It may very well be possible that your photo has been used in a certificate.
And fourth, if your photo doesn't end up in the calendar, ask yourself if you submitted it before. Doing this isn't easy. And I'll apologize before I say this. Sorry. If you send the same image two or three years in a row, I may think we've already used it. In one case, I keep getting the same photo that was in the 2017 calendar. Should I use the exact same photo again?
Gun to my head, I'd speculate that these days, 50% of Alpines are red and 20% are white (a completely unscientific guess based on what I see in the photos and at the various car shows). And as beautiful as your car may be, you could put five different Alpines on the same background, and you'd be hard pressed to pick yours out of a lineup. So the photo setting itself is what makes it. Is your photo setting boring or interesting? Is it simple or is it distracting? Is it fun, funny, exciting, cool? Is it clean or does it have something in it that makes it illegal or inappropriate? Does the average member want to look at your neighbor's ugly Dodge Caravan in the background? Will the require a great deal of retouching or cropping? These are the questions I have to ask myself when I fire up Photoshop and InDesign.
After some 40-50 hours of scrounging, begging, retouching, stretching, fretting, deciding, designing, and various other machinations of putting together a calendar (then putting $1,200 worth on my personal credit card), if there magically happen to be leftover photos, those photos get moved into next year's folder. I'm excited to say that the 2021 folder is the fullest I've ever seen at this point. And I'd be more than happy to share that folder with whoever wants to design the calendar and certificates next year.
Greg
