One big change that my business has made in the last year is offering albums with wedding collections. This is a change I'm so, so proud of and excited to build further. Most of my current clients do choose to include an album in their wedding collection, and I'm so thankful for it. Designing albums is a part of the business that a lot of photographers hate - they even frequently outsource it. It's actually one of my favorite things! I majored in graphic design in school and my favorite graphic design project I was ever assigned was a magazine layout. Later, when I had a job in graphic design, what I loved the most on the job was book and magazine layout. It's like a beautiful puzzle! Read my bio, I LOVE a puzzle.
Again, most of my current clients do include albums in their collections. This blog post is not about selling albums. It's about sharing why I think albums are deeply valuable and an essential part of the wedding photography process.
The purpose of your wedding photos is to help you relive the story of your special day, and help share that story with family and friends for generations to come. I think it's a real disservice to your wedding story to have a bunch of jpgs sitting in a folder on your desktop or external hard drive. Scrolling through icon size photos whenever you happen to stumble across them on your computer is not an ideal way to relive your day. Creating an album is the perfect book end (no pun intended) on your wedding photography experience. Often the experience is left dangling when the photos are delivered to the client and then no further action is taken.
Of course, prints are also a great way to use your photos for their purpose of sharing your story. If you are anything like me though, only so many prints are acceptable. I have over 700 wedding photos to choose from, and I'm not going to hang them all up in my living room. An album allows for a large amount of photos to all be collected together, and in STORY format. The albums I create are chronologically designed. This chronological visual paired with your personal narration makes the perfect way to share the story.
For almost every wedding there's an important family member or friend who wasn't able to be there. For us it was Kyle's grandmother. She wasn't able to travel from California to Texas for our wedding. Kyle and his grandmother are the best of friends, so it was crushing for both of them that Grandma Shirley couldn't be there. However, it's important to both of us that she be able to feel like she didn't miss a thing. In the same way, our children will be able to look at our wedding album and feel transported to that moment in time when mom and dad got married. I'm really excited to share our album with them someday.
I didn't have the option to order our own album right after our wedding, but I've now designed one for us and it should come in soon! I'll share photos when it comes in.
