I have already reported on how I’m thrilled to be giving a paper at the Philadelphia Flower Show next spring. Today’s posting is telling of my other photography-related thrill of this year.

The photo shows our company’s ‘Holiday’ gift for this year. It’s MY calendar. It contains thirteen photos that I took – twelve foodie shots (some of which have appeared in my potd pics) and a tiny self-portrait (that also appeared….always maximise the value out of one shot I say!).

It came about because of a few of my colleagues from the USA seeing the calendar I’d prepared for the NYC girls in March at Jill’s suggestion. One of my colleagues suggested to my boss that it’d be a good idea to get me to do a calendar for the company to demonstrate to our clients that our employees are multi-talented, not just great researchers. My boss thought that was a great idea and mooted it to me with a suggestion that she also wanted to demonstrate that we know how to ‘think global, act local’.

When I reviewed the calendar that I’d done already, I decided it wasn’t of high enough quality photo-wise and so decided to shoot new pics (only two from the original NYC calendar remain). I then got scared. I decided I wasn’t capable….. so stuck my head in the sand and forgot all about it for a few months. I suddenly remembered my promise to do it and didn’t want to break it or let down my boss so set about shooting the pics and finding my ‘factoids’ about the things in the pics. I stuck with food because after all, it is an international language in itself. I added comments about the food in the pics and got the whole lot laid out by DM in the shape of our company logo. The dates of all of the holidays of all of the major religions of the world are printed in the relevant dates on the pages and the whole thing looks, if I say so myself, rather good.

It went to print a couple of weeks ago, with a huge run of 3,500 copies, 3,000 of which are to be delivered to clients around the world (wowie and terror come to me in equal measure about this – I still think most will see that they are amateur shots) and the remaining 500 are being distributed among the staff for their desks.

Boy am I proud? I am so proud that I can’t stop grinning. When a colleague said that she’d heard I was doing it and thought it’d be crap, I cringed because I thought there were probably many others who would feel the same. You know the sort of thing….that Linda – she’s on such an ego trip, she thinks she can take photos but really it’s all an illusion. She went on to say she’d never seen such a good calendar (and indeed emailed my boss to say so) then went on to tell me how she’d had to explain the relevance of the food and text to one other colleague so not only did she say it was fab but she ‘got’ it too.

In 2004 I have learned a huge amount about composition and about lighting my subject. I still have a long way to go to get close to DMs standard but the good thing is I keep pushing him to be better because otherwise I’d catch up. We both benefit from that.