Feb
29
2012
Album vs disc – Why albums are still important
DISCLAIMER: I know this post will ruffle a few feathers with brides to be. But please, read with an open mind, and just hear me out. It’s something that I feel needs to be discussed.
When I started shooting wedding photography in 2004 all of my brides and grooms purchased prints and albums.
In 2007, I began getting my first inquiries for disc only packages, which I didn’t offer at the time. It was a new concept to me, to just “give” the photos away, and a concept that I wasn’t comfortable with. You see, as a wedding photographer, my aim is to create the story of a couples wedding day, and as an artist, to present that story in the best way possible for generations to see. Simply handing over the disc after the wedding felt like I was leaving my customers with only half the job done.
So why was that? Well every image we print or put into an album goes through a process of enhancement to make sure that image is the best it can be. This can be nothing more than a bit of contrast or colour enhancement or it can mean, cropping, removal of distracting signs or wires, black and white conversion and skin tone adjustment and much more. This is something the vast majority of couples wouldn’t even think of, or know how to do, and means that they may be denying themselves of the chance to display and show off the finished image we had in our minds when we first created it.
Now of course, every customer that just wanted the disc only package had requested so because it was their intention to create their own prints and maybe put together their own album from one of the many online “photobook” companies. Their thinking was simply to save money and that, by doing it themselves, they would end up with a similar product to what we offered but for a bit less.
Now in 2005 I was the one getting married to my beautiful wife Claire. At that time, I was working along side another wedding photographer who agreed to cover our wedding day. Obviously, as a wedding photographer myself, I asked if he would cover the main part of the wedding and give me the high res files on cd so I could make my own prints and design a fantastic album for my wife. He begrudgingly agreed and a few weeks later I had all our images on cd.
So fast forward to 2012! Do I have fantastic prints adorning the walls of our home and a gorgeous, hand made album in our possession to show our friends?
NO WE HAVEN’T!!!!!!
You see, like 90% of couples who want a cd only, our lives went on after the wedding day and we just never got around to doing much with those files with the exception of a few prints and of course the obligatory social networking site. 11 months after our wedding my wife gave birth to our first son and any free time we might have had before then simply vanished. We kept saying “we must sit down and sort our wedding photos” but we never seemed to get around to it. Two years later my wife eventually took the cd to a local supermarket and printed out a load of 6″x4″ on their instant machine. These prints are much lower quality than those I create for my couples and to be honest, I’m incredibly embarrassed about anyone seeing them.
Then in Dec 2011, our close friend got married and asked my wife to be bridesmaid (yes I shot their wedding, and no, they didn’t just get a cd, I’ve insisted they have an album first). During the evening of the hen do, our house was filled with girls getting ready, when one of them said to my wife “you must have an amazing wedding album?” To which my wife replied “no, just a bunch of 6″x4″ prints in a cheap stick in album” I hung my head in shame!
This was the last straw and I’m now in the process of producing the album my wife should have had 7 years ago!
After this epiphany, I contacted several of my past brides, who opted for a cd only, to ask them how they got on with their own creations and guess what?
Not a SINGLE couple had done anything more than print a handful of small prints for their family and pop some pics on Facebook!!! Like us, they just never got around to sitting down and doing what they thought they were going to do before the wedding day. Nearly every couple I spoke to now wish they had not cut their photography budget and had me create an album for them instead.
Now of course we do still continue to offer a cd only package for those couples who really don’t want an album from us but, save a few pounds elsewhere in your wedding planning and you will probably never notice, save a few pounds dropping the album and, like me, you may just end looking back years from now and regretting it. No, your wedding album isn’t going to sit on your coffee table for the next 25 years but it will always be close by, ready to look through, whenever you want to relive that special day. And, without taking the time or investment in having an album made, you may just end up denying, not only yourself, but your future family too, the first heirloom you will ever invest in as a married couple
And one final point:
All our albums packages come with the high res files anyway, delivered with your album, so you will always have those files but also something to show your children and grandchildren at your 50th anniversary (do you really want to explain what a DVD is and why you can’t find anything to read them anymore)
So before you decide to book that “shoot’n’burn” package, ask yourself if you really just want a load of images on your favourite social media site and a disc that you may well never get around to printing or let us create the perfect story of your wedding day, in a beautiful hand crafted album that you will be able to share with each other and your families for the rest of your life (and then store your cd somewhere safe as security instead)