Looking at your wedding photographs and reliving all the happy, enjoyable moments of your day is the fun part. The hard part is trying to figure out how you’ll possibly cut out any of these amazing images and still tell the whole story of the day in a wedding album.
[See Steph and Tim’s Real Wedding Feature here.]
This was Steph’s predicament. She loved her wedding photographs! She looked at them online, she paged through her proof booklet, and she loved so many of them.
From nearly 700 images, Steph narrowed her favorites to almost 200 photographs that she felt represented her wedding. And then she contacted me. She didn’t know how to cut any more from her favorites! These included many of her family and friends, as well as special moments and details that let her remember the wedding completely. So, she then gave me her list.
Certainly, I can design albums to hold every image a bride and groom pick out. However, usually the story can be enhanced by some experienced polishing.
My motto is: “It’s not what you leave in, it’s what you take out.” When I first prepare images for a wedding couple, I spend a lot of time to ensure that every image they see is album-worthy. But just as an overly wordy paragraph can lose a reader, a bloated album doesn’t highlight the very special and personal moments that are important to the bride and groom.
The next step with Steph and Tim’s wedding album was to go through this list of images. Steph was a little worried about this appointment. She thought it was going to be so difficult to make decisions about which photographs to cut.
I assured her that I was there to help and to make the whole process pain-free! She and I sat down and talked about what was important to include in the album. We then talked about easy ways to cut images.
For example, she had chosen images of the entire bridal party processing into the ceremony, recessing out of the ceremony and entering the reception. In an album, these images can become repetitive, so we picked the best of the three options. In this case, we used processional images.
We continued through the list of images in a similar way. We would group photographs together that included the same people or were taken in the same place and chose the best ones. This avoided unnecessary duplicates in the album.
Next, we looked at all the remaining images to see how they progressed through the day. We wanted to make sure we told the whole story of the wedding and that we didn’t have any holes in the photo-narrative.
Once Steph was satisfied, my design work began. I custom-designed a 10×8 album with 30 pages, along with a photo cover. Steph then reviewed the design, approved it and the album went into final production.
The result was a gorgeous album that beautifully and concisely showcased the entire day for them to be able to show off, share and enjoy for years to come.
