One of my favorite tasks in the year is to gather new photos for the next Lenspiration calendar!

But it might come as a surprise to you from which corner of my collection of photos those new candidates come from!

This year I’m putting together Lenspiration’s 2025 fine-art wall calendar. You might think that I would sort through 2024’s photos to find new photos to put into the 2025 calendar. Well, that actually doesn’t work. 2024 isn’t over yet! No autumn photos have been taken this year. There’s only been half a winter season so far this year. And I can’t wait until the end of December to choose which photos go into the 2025 calendar because I have to have the calendar assembled and printed and shipped to everybody long before the first day of 2025!

No, new candidates for the 2025 calendar do not come from the year 2024.

They come from 2023! Every year, I go back to the previous year to scour over each and every folder to find the calendar-worthy ones!

In any given year, I very seldom have the time to edit every single folder of photos that I take. Many landscape photos are taken just for the enjoyment of it during a side excursion in the middle of a busy business trip. A short sunrise hike here. A pull-off on the side of the road there. It’s amazing the random places I find myself taking pictures!

But since landscape photos do not generally have a deadline for being edited or a concrete purpose for being taken, it’s not very often that they ever get processed immediately. It’s the photos that are taken for a specific objective that get pushed through the pipeline. Wedding photos. Family portraits. Shoot to Serve Assignment photos. Most folders containing photos from landscape photoshoots sit dormant through the year.

That is, until it’s time to gather up new photos for the following year’s calendar! Suddenly, the landscape photos have a purpose. There is now a reason and a deadline for them to be sorted and edited!

And what a super fun time that is. Each folder is like a little treasure chest. Sometimes I will have already gone through to pick out the biggest gems for a Wallpaper or blog post. But more often than not, each folder is only lightly touched, and it’s a real pleasure to blow the dust off old memories and find out exactly how successful some of those random escapades actually were.

Each year, I usually only have time to edit the landscape photos of the preceding year. But that works great! If I follow the same process every year in preparation for each next-year’s calendar, then I will be able to stay on top of my collection of photos year after year and prevent folders of unedited photos from getting buried forever.

This year, after sorting through 2023’s landscape photos, I came out with 35 new candidates for the 2025 calendar. Only 12 photos can actually go into a calendar, so I’d love to get your feedback on which ones you think are actually good enough to make the cut! If you’d like to vote on your favorites, feel free to do so at this 2025 Calendar Photo survey.

Of the 35 candidates, there are some that are actually very similar to each other. For instance, here are two similar photos of a gorgeous little chapel we photographed on the St. Simon’s Island photography workshop in 2023:

They would both make great calendar photos, but which one do you think is better? Getting input from a large pool of beauty-loving connoisseurs might help me know how to make the cut. 🙂

Another aspect I’m hoping to gain some input on is how far to go with including the “people element.” There happened to be more photos with people in them in 2023 than usual. Like these, taken at the beach in Florida:

Hooked a Sunrise
North Peninsula State Park Beach Access, Florida
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Or, it could be that folks think that the people element is a good idea only if it was a little more subtle. Like this, during the CAPTURE Indiana workshop at Turkey Run State Park:

Or not at all.

Do more people out there think that including the people element in my calendars is better, or not? I don’t know. That’s why I’m putting the photos in a survey.

Another concept I’m considering after seeing the new candidates from 2023 is including a photo or two that actually is not landscape at all. What if this photo, taken for the September 2023 photo assignment, was used for the month of July in the 2025 calendar?

Let me know what you think in the survey! Or perhaps this photo for whatever month Resurrection Sunday will happen to be on in 2025 . . .

Have an opinion? I can’t wait to hear what you all have to say!

Voting ends midnight, Tuesday, September 17. After that, I’ll make the final decision on the final 12 and get started on assembling the Lenspiration 2025 Calendar for official publication!

Click here to begin the survey.