A few months back one of my friends that I’ve shot with a lot asked me if I would help her put together a calendar to give to her boyfriend for Christmas. I’ve been wanting to do a project like that for a while, so I happily accepted. It ended up being a lot of work, but it was pretty fun. I wish we could have went outside for more shots, but we did the best we could.
Some of the shots are shots I’ve shown before, but I also want to share a few new ones we took just for the calendar, so here is a preview of the 2010 Kristen Calendar!
February
June
August
November
The rest were either too revealing or not as exciting as these. It took a long time to put this together, even with re-using some shots that we had done in the past. I think we did 3 or 4 separate shoots to get the missing months and then we tried different ideas for each month. Then there was all of the editing and post-production to be done. We spent a lot of time together working on this, so I hope her boyfriend appreciates it. 
If you want to know more about how a shot was lit you can click the image to go to it’s Flickr page and read more about it. This is definitely something I’d like to offer to other people, but because of the amount of time and planning involved it wouldn’t be something cheap. If you conservatively plan for an hour per month for shooting, you’re at 12 hours already, plus a few hours for planning, and then probably at least another hour per month for post-production and you’re looking at about a 30 hour project, minimum. At commercial photographer rates you’re looking at about 3-4 days worth of creative fees, which could run anywhere from $500/day to $10,000/day, or if I were to just charge a very nice hourly rate of $20/hour you’re still looking at $600 minimum, or a more realistic hourly rate of $50 or more would push it up to $1,500 or more. I’d settle for a happy medium around $1000, depending on the shoots you would want.
So, it wouldn’t be a cheap project/present, but it would definitely be unique. A one-of-a-kind calendar for that special someone in your life. I’d definitely be willing to do it again, so if you’re interested in getting a calendar made and are willing to put in the time and effort and can afford it, shoot me an email and we can make it happen!
Great project Matt. I am sure Kristen and her boyfriend were well pleased!