The Beauty of Albums

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.

The Stephanie Benge Story

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I'm interested in not only telling my client's stories, but telling my clients MY stories. 

I guess a good place to start is the story of how I became Stephanie Benge Photography.

Well, to be honest, photographer is the only thing that I ever wanted to be for more than just a few moments in time. When I was in fourth grade and really liked my fourth grade teacher I wanted to be a teacher. Except that I don't actually like kids, or teaching, or anything that teachers have to do. So that was short lived. For a while in middle school I wanted to be a lawyer, but I feel pretty strongly that this phase in my life was a direct result of the movie Legally Blonde and not founded in any kind of reality about lawyering. Later in middle school I fell in love with American history. I still love history, but I don't want to be a history teacher, a historian, a historical writer, or a politician. In high school my favorite subject was band. Yes, I was a band geek. I thought for a long time my career was bound to be tied up in that. But I don't want to be a band director (again, that's teaching), and professional saxophonists aren't really a think unless you're Kenny G. And who wants to be Kenny G? Nobody. Not even Kenny G, probably. 

What I wanted from my job was the ability to be my own boss and make my own hours. I wanted to do something that I personally cared about rather than doing a job just to be doing a job. I wanted to be able to sit behind a computer (you're looking at a serious introvert here), but also provide a customer service and interact with cool people when I wasn't busy introverting.

Right when this realization was hitting me I met Amanda. Amanda had just graduated from college and started a photography business. I thought to myself - that's a think I could do! I have always loved taking photos, though they were never professional level. Amanda took me along to a couple of weddings and taught me a bit about how to use my camera - and I was hooked! After the first wedding with her I thought YES. THIS IS MY THING. I did my first solo wedding later that year and I've been chasing down that dream ever since.

I was still in college for several years after that first solo wedding, so I focused on my school work rather than my business. Immediately after graduating college I didn't have enough wedding work to make that my only income. It wasn't until just recently that I was able to make photography my FULL TIME job. 

I guess my message to you is to find a passion, not a job. What's the thing you really LOVE to do? What's the thing that clicks YES, THIS IS MY THING? No matter what you have to do to chase that - chase it. This is your real, one-and-only life. You should be doing what you love. I am. :) 

Story Tellers

Photographers these days are always describing themselves as "story tellers". It's actually become a little cliche, unfortunately. "I love to tell my clients love stories through photos..." etcetera. Well, here I am telling you that I'M A STORY TELLER. I don't mean as a photographer. I've been a story teller for as long as I can remember. I love to tell stories that make people laugh, specifically. When something ridiculous, annoying, uncommon happens to me my first thought is "I can't wait to get home and tell my friends this story". I've even thought about having a personal blog where I talk about the ridiculous sitcom-y things that have happened to me over the years. 

Here's one of my favorites:

My senior year of college my long time boyfriend and I broke up. It was devastating. There was a lot of crying, sappy voicemail pleading, cookie dough eating, romcom watching. The usual. 

About a month after the break up (right around the time I starting bathing regularly again and being able to leave my dorm without bursting into tears) I was hired for a photo shoot! I met the clients for shoot and then they realized they had left some article of clothing at their home. We were only a minute or so from their home, so we drove back to get what had been left behind. I thought about staying in the car while the article was retrieved, but I started having a coughing fit. The clients suggested I run inside and get a glass of water. Good idea - I'll do that. 

I walked inside to the kitchen and guess who's standing there? My ex boyfriend. He was staying a couple of nights at their home. The client, of course, didn't know that we knew each other and had dated. The client INTRODUCED us - and in the name of not making the client feel like and idiot I went along with it. "Oh, so good to meet you" and shook his hand with the widest dear-in-headlights-eyes I've ever had on my face. 

On our way back out the door the client said something along the lines of "you guys have a lot in common, I really think you'd like him..."

Yeah...

At the time that story was horrible because it upset me so much, but now it seems like the kind of thing that would happen on a tv show that has a laugh track. I think even then I knew - this would be worth it for the story. 

I ask my clients to trust me to tell their stories. Not just any story, their WEDDING story. That's a pretty important one. 

I feel like I should return the favor and tell my clients MY stories. This was my first step.