12/15/2025
I spent a good week choosing the cover. It might seem easy but it’s a tough choice. I start off with choosing one photoshoot from a bunch throughout the year. From there, I go picture after picture selection potential candidates for the cover. On a normal photoshoot, I keep around 100-150 photos. After my first pass through, I narrow it down to about 10 pictures. I wait until the next day to go through the smaller batch to narrow it down even more. I look at every little detail and if one thing looks slightly off, then I trash it. Things like fingers opened weird, toes pointing the wrong way, weird reflection in the car, room for text and so on. This usually narrows it down to 4 pictures. I spend another day editing those 4 like if they were the cover images. Then I print them to see how they look in my hand. I set them side by side and finally chose the final image.
This year was a tough one. Thalia and Ceci ( , ) killed it with this one. Ceci always delivers the best pinup looks by far. Everything from hair, makeup and outfit is perfectly selected. Then Thalia executes all the right poses and expressions to tie everything together.
This was my second choice for the cover. I’m loving the pose and overall feel of the shot. Only thing I didn’t like is there was not enough room for the calendar text or my logo and the car didn’t align with the horizon since we were on a ramp. That was enough to not be chosen as the cover shot.