The tale of every princess I have ever read to my daughters is told in the form of a storybook. I fondly recall the days when my girls would dress up in little princess gowns and fairy wings, dancing while standing on the feet of their first Prince Charming, preparing for the day they will dance that first dance with their husband at their wedding reception.
I firmly believe every wedding is a story of a special princess on her most important day, and I am lucky enough to be chosen to be your storyteller. I know how corny that sounds, but you’ve been waiting for and dreaming about this day your whole life. If you have chosen me to be your storyteller, then we need to talk about your storybook – your wedding album.
Let me explain some of the vocabulary of wedding albums. Due to confusion over the word “pages” (as there are two sides to a page), the industry adopted the word “side” as it’s a clearer term. Let’s assume you’re ordering a 12?x12? album. When you open the album, the first image you’ll see is a single 12×12 square “side” – one side of a page. When you turn the page, you will be looking at a 12? high by 24? wide rectangular image composed of two sides facing each other. When two sides are presented in such a way they’re called a “spread”. So 1 spread = 2 sides, and 1 page = 2 sides, but 1 page <> 1 spread. Hope that makes sense!
Albums prices vary based on many factors: the quality of the cover (anything from linen to specialty leather – you can even supply your own tapestry), the quality of binding, whether the pages are press printed (like a high-end coffee-table book) or are actually mounted photographs, album sleeves to protect your investment, etc. They are also priced based on how many sides you get. While some photographers may also charge per image, I generally won’t as long as I can maintain the creative control over the page layout. I want to insure that your album is the absolute best I can make it; I don’t generally put more than 4-6 images (including background image) on a two-side spread as the images get too cluttered when you go past that amount. Some of my spreads may have 9 images, while others have only 1 or 2 images. I change things around a lot to keep each page different and new, so the 4-6 images per double side is an averaged artistic guideline and not a hard rule. My goal is to tell the story of your wedding day in the most emotional, fun and compelling way possible, and I design each spread as a chapter of your story. For instance, look at these two spreads from the same album. Notice how while these spreads are close to each other in time and in the album, each spread tells a different portion of Laura and Rand’s story.
Note that there are a few example albums in a sub-menu located under the Weddings/StorybookAlbums menu options which give you a feel for different design styles I can adopt for your specific tastes.
Because so many options are available, and because your preferences and desires will be unique, I include my press-printed Modern Album, the lowest cost album I offer, at 10?x10? size unless otherwise noted, with the minimum of 20 sides (10 spreads) in wedding packages which contain albums. While the Modern Album is lowest cost, it is not low end! It is a beautiful hardcover book, bound in a canvas print of your favorite wedding image, with special lay-flat hinged pages using a 6-color printing process on an HP Indigo Digital Press, the highest quality digital press printing technology available. This sets a high quality baseline album configuration which you can then customize and upgrade as you wish. I also allow you to trade in the value of some of your loose prints for album upgrades. All album upgrades use photographic paper instead of press printing, and are available in a wide variety of styles, covers and storage options.
Once the spreads of your storybook are designed, you can use that same layout to order parent albums (10×10, 8×8 or 5×5 are most common). In my packages, all parent albums are 5×5 Modern Albums and are upgradable to any size or album maker. Since there’s no additional design charges for extra albums, your costs are kept down. (That’s the reason I highly recommend and standardize on square format albums – unlike rectangular formats, the proportions never change and resizing incurs no additional charges.)
You can also order 3×3 paperback mini-albums (available in sets of 10 only) as gifts for your bridal party, relatives and friends for a very low investment – close to the cost of a single 5×5 Modern Album! These also use the same top-quality 6-color processing on Indigo printers, but due to their size do not include the lay-flat hinged pages. These make outstanding thank-you gifts and are wonderful keepsakes of your wedding. If you are considering this, I ask that you let me know before I design the storybook layout, as I need to take the small 3×3 size into consideration as I do my design work. The example images you see above are approximately the size of the 5×5 or 3×3 albums (depending on your monitor’s size & resolution settings).
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