I spent yesterday doing a first cut through the 24,000 or so photos that I’ve taken this year to select candidates for the annual gift calendars I’ve been making for well over a decade. Three calendars—dawn, dogs, and then our cats. I managed to make it through my first cut of dawn and dogs. Hopefully cats won’t take as long, since they’re pre-screened via Feline Fridays.

These calendars become our holiday gifts that cover most friends and acquaintances, and then I know there are a few of you who purchase your own copies. But that means I’ve got to get them done ASAP in order to have copies to distribute.

Here’s the problem. My initial cut ended with 161 photos to choose from. And I have to get that down to just 13–one per month, and a cover. I’ll probably do one more culling just based on photo quality and interest, which might eliminate a dozen or two. Then the hard work starts.

Lots of variables to consider. I trying to choose photos actually taken in the month they appear, so that those who pay attention to such things can track the sun as it moves across the mornign sky through the seasons. Then I try for variety in perspective, color, weather conditions, etc.

In the end, once I can get down to no more than 3 photos per month, I can make the final choice that provides a suitable degree of variety, avoids unnecessary duplication of views, and so on.

Oh, then all have to be cropped and tweaked to fit in the calendar layout, then uploaded, double checked, and pau.

Of course, then I have to repeat the process with dogs, which have an added step of annotations with each dog’s name.

I’ll be pretty frazzled by the time Monday’s happy hour arrives!

Just fyi, here are 28 of the 161 photos competing to be in the “Kahala at Dawn” calendar for 2022.