Have you considered creating a photo calendar, or greeting cards or perhaps a photo book as a way to share your images with friends and family? These are great ways to provide unique gifts for birthday, anniversaries, and holidays and also a potential sales outlet for your art. I personally create a yearly photo book to chronicle my travel through the year. I give them away as gifts and also sell them through my web site, but even if I didn’t give them away or sell them, I find that putting my images into publication form provides the satisfaction of accomplishment and something I can enjoy for years to come.

Making a set of greeting cards, or a yearly calendar or a photo book will actually help make you a better photographer because it forces you to take a close and critical look at your images. You may want to create a certain theme and use the appropriate images within that theme or you may want to select your best overall images to use. Whatever the context, you will go through a self-critique examination that will make you think about each image and relive the experience of taking that image. This process is a real trip down memory lane for me!

Once you have the images selected, how do you actually go about creating a publication? Well, it is relatively easy these days. There are numerous internet site which will create greeting cards, calendars and/or photo books for you. Even your local Staples, Walgreens, Costco or Walmart can produce photo cards and calendars. If you use Adobe Lightroom to process your images, there is a Book menu option that can easily format your selected images and send them off to a bookmaker. Here are some of the more popular internet sites, many with easy-to-use formats and text creating capabilities:

Greeting Cards –
www.mpix.com
www.snapfish.com
www.picaboo.com
www.vistaprint.com

Calendars –
www.shutterfly.com
www.mpix.com
www.adoramapix.com
www.picaboo.com

Photo Books –
www.shutterfly.com
www.mixbook.com
www.blurb.com
www.pintsizeproductions.com