Kickoff to 2012: Calendar

2012 Calendar photo taken in Clearfield, PA

Taking the photo

For this year’s calendar photo, I thought it might be nice to hilight one of our new customers: a coal company near Clearfield, Pennsylvania. I couldn’t resist the curves of this bridge since it so nicely shows off the company name on the side of the locomotives and the red coal cars.

The process of taking this photo was pretty perilous since there’s nothing to stand on from this vantage point. We got a Jig Lift so I could boom out over the water. I still couldn’t quite get far enough out, so I attached the camera to a monopod, set it on 10 second timer and extended it even further. I took my wife along since the calendar is always a fun shoot, and I was using our personal camera. She had to look away when I started hanging the camera over the water.

Obviously there had to be some photoshop work done to that dirt patch in the bottom-right corner, but compared to past years this had very little alteration.

Alternate Calendar Photo

The bridge was actually my second choice of location. My first pick was at the coal cleaning plant where we unload the train. It’s always nice to feature a customer on our calendar but it didn’t quite have that dynamic impact that a wide-angle photo gives, and you can’t see the company name on the coal cars.

The owner of our company still couldn’t quite decide, so we produced a couple hundred calendars of the alternate photo to give to that customer – just for fun.

One thing is for sure: if I ever had a fear of heights, that’s long gone now.