While a bride can order prints or images from her wedding day from almost any photographer, our preferred result from a wedding day is a custom crafted wedding album, designed to showcase the complete story of the day. An album has the ability to distill a series of wonderful moments in time into a framework to remember, something that family and friends can hang their favorite memories on for the rest of their lives. A box of prints, or even a few portraits hung on the wall simply don’t tell the story like an album can.

There are many approaches to the design of an album; we generally start with the best images showing the whole story in it’s timeline order. We then place related images together on one or more two-page spreads in the album (a spread is two pages that are open at the same time). Sometimes a moment in the story is so compelling that it deserves it’s own spread (for example, the first kiss, or the first dance), other parts of the day have many images that are combined to create an overall impression from that portion of the day in a single spread (for example, important guest candid moments or really funny situations.) Selecting the images to be used can actually take a fair bit of effort; there are so many photographs that could be included that simply won’t fit in most albums and so we have to choose not to use what otherwise are wonderful images. Of course, some book printing styles afford more pages than others. If we are designing a coffee table style album we can generally have more pages than if we are doing an album that has lay-flat pages.

When we’re done, we have a draft design that the bride and her family can review. If necessary, the bride can make a few changes to remove that strange party crasher that showed up uninvited, or perhaps add some focus to a best friend. Since we are dealing with digital design we can create custom family versions of the main album, perhaps with additional group photographs or a family sequence slightly different from the main album. These can all generally be done very quickly based on the main album and released to print at the same time.

Whether we create an album for a bride or not, we always make images available for the family and friends to order, and we also place some of the best images on our Facebook page so everyone can see and comment on the things that they remember about the day and the people.

An album Hannah designed earlier this year is below to show an example. Note that most albums start and end with a single page, following the general book-making practice of starting page 1 on the right hand side.