Not all wedding albums are
created equal. The main issue is that like anything, you get what you pay for,
but when your wedding photography package includes an album what exactly are
you paying for. Some albums can be as little as £30 for the photographer to
buy.
A professional grade album
can easily cost the photographer £500, so if your whole wedding package costs
£700 the included album is unlikely to be the £500 one.
Also most of the major
album manufacturers will only supply to professional photographers and not the
general public so if the person shooting your wedding is not a recognized
professional they may be “locked out” of the better quality albums.
A well thought out
designed album is very time consuming for the photographer to create and therefore
you would expect not to be cheep. But
there are short cuts that the photographer can use for an included package
album.
The most common one is to
say to you that you can only pick a certain amount of images and for a 20 page
book, this may be something like 50 images. And then you have to leave it to
the photographer as to where and how big each image will feature on the page
because any extra input from you means extra work for the photographer and is
not costed for, these books can be turned out by the photographer in a couple
of hours. So that the only say you may of had is which 50 images you are going
to choose.
But this can then be a
very good way for the photographer to up-sale to you as the included album only
holds 50 images when you may be having to choose form 400.
There are also many names
for albums- photobook, storybook, coffee table book,
contemporary album, matted or just an album, these are just a few that you may
come across.
If a quality wedding book
is included in your price then you should expect to see that reflected in the
wedding package price.
I don’t include an album
in my wedding photography because I prefer to provide what I think is a better
more personal and quality product at a later stage and one that lets you have complete
control in the design process, that will be a one off and just for you.
With my albums you can spend as long as you like in designing the album and can
include any of the guests snaps or honeymoon snaps and even actual swatches of
material from the day or the actual order of service or invites and menus. Many
couples even wait until the 1st anniversary which is paper which
then makes a perfect gift to each other.
My 2016 albums start from just £289
The wedding albums that I
supply use actual photographs that are professionally lab printed.
All my photo editing is
done on a professional grade calibrated monitor that is also matched to the
labs print output for the very best and most accurate colours.
One of the issues with the
low cost photobooks some photographers may use in a package can be with the colour
saturation giving an un-natural look and also lack of detail in the white
or light areas like the wedding dress.
If you are shown a sample of an included photobook make
sure you particularly look at the brides dress and ask yourself if you can
still see any detail that should be there.
Some people shooting
weddings on a part time basis will not even offer an album because to do it
properly you need to fully understand colour proofing, file dimensions, and
sizes, which is one reasons that the best manufactures will not supply to non
professionals because of the constant colour or size mistakes.
But there is a place for
the low cost albums that you can easily get printed online yourself, you will
have your official one but then why not create a slightly more informal
photobook with all the extra shots although pricless and hilarious gems in
their own right, for whatever reason did not end up in the main album.
Also you could create one
for each set of parents and the images would then be bespoke to them and their
family.
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