It’s been a long couple of weeks, I’ve been (figuratively) chained to the desk in the basement working on albums and doing the post on what seems like millions of photos. Two of my cameras broke while shooting a wedding – the two batteries on the big black camera’s battery grip literally shot out, snapping the hooks and the housing – fortunately I had backup cameras, but that would account for my dry wit at Avianto. After many phone call and trips to Kayalami, the local Nikon repair center and I are finally seeing eye to eye as to who should be paying for the repairs. Anyway, it’s been a while so I figured a bit of an update on what is going on in the studio is in order.

Nicola and John’s album, they’re the baobab guys, was nominated for an album award. After speaking to Nicola we decided not to submit it, I’m not really big on photography competitions, but it was nice to get recognition for a really cool album. I don’t think I posted anything from that album so a quick couple.

I also finished Swathi and Andrei’s killer bee Mauritius album.

I even finished Shelley and Marc’s Shepstone Gardens album (some from that one later this week, after they get a chance to see it). I did find this cool birdcage pic amongst the images – I’ve been having a Eugenio Recuenco week, so it may just be me that loves this pic.

We also opened a couple of dates in Jan, March and May due to cancellations for those that are still looking. I did send out mails to everyone who asked to let them know if anything changed. I’m also in the process of investigating switching back to the traditional albums from the storybook, coffee table books, and am in talks with a local bookbinder to make me a custom sample album.

Also really getting into Hendrik Kerstens’ portraits.

Way too many fantastic spreads from this one. A typical Dullstroom winter’s day, all grey, misty, roaring fires inside, chandeliers. Just altogether amazing.

Well, the website seems to have vanished today due to some issues at our hosting provider, so I’m setting this up via an automated update tool, which should post it as soon as the website is back up. The studio will be closed until the 15th, I’m off to write my exams and spend a couple of days in Cape Town recovering from the last six months of wedding photography – I’m not as fit as I used to be.

A quick sneak peek of Melissa and Steve’s album which I’ve just finished, hopefully once I’m actually online I can upload all these albums fairly quickly. I’ve already posted so many images from this wedding that I’m only going to post a couple of pages from the pre-wedding section of the day. It’s my favorite part of the day, everyone is excited and nervous and there is so much energy and emotion.

All this time off from the internet and email has had me putting together a serious amount of album pages. Putting together albums is the flipside of photographing weddings. Most people can pull together one or two great photos from a wedding, add a lot of photoshop and you can easily get a couple of killer pics from a wedding to post on a blog. The trick comes from photographing a wedding for an album; you need to shoot sequences, images that fit together, narrate a story, give an idea of what the wedding was about. It’s why I always tell my clients at their consultations that the photography has to be a collaboration between the photographer and the couple.

Anyway, just wanted to show off some pages from Thandi and Tom’s wedding. It has one of my favorite double pages ever. It’s a 60 page Asuka btw.

btw I’ve been listening to a lot of Vampire Weekend, really cool rock band with some reggae touches. Reminds me a lot of The Clash if they had grown up in Joburg and immigrated to London. Check out Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, or The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance.

Just uploaded Paula and Alan’s draft album and wanted to share the two double page panoramas, that’s about half a meter end-to-end, that we are including.

I recently loaned my album to Andrea and haven’t had a chance to get it back yet. So I was recently a bit lost when I was doing a consultation and couldn’t show an album. To remedy that until I get the album back, here are some images of that sample album.

Our exclusive range of hard cover books have a high-end feel that is reminiscent of fine art coffee table books. Presented in an exclusive red or black book case. Each page has a laminate protective coating in either a Matte or a Glossy finish to preserve its appearance and has a lifetime guarantee. The pages are book bound which means that the the signature pages are stacked together, cut down the center and adhered to the spine of the book using perfect binding.

We delivered a draft version of Maryanne and Scott’s album a couple of days ago and received this email in reply.

“…Hi Dror

I love love love the album… I dont mind at all if you want to use it as a sample album. I have nothing to change, at first I thought of adding a few, but then looked at the album again and realised that it is just perfect because it makes me remember the whole day from beginning to end… “

We really appreciate getting these kinds of emails, it means that we managed to capture the day as the couple want to remember it and present the album in such a way that it tells the story.

As humans our first thought is almost always to try and add more images to an album, it is an instinctual thing, probably something to do with a stone age ancestor and the scarcity of food. Sometimes however in order for an image to stand out and be given full justice it needs some whitespace, or as my father always use to say when I cropped too tightly, it needs to breath. My father is still taking photographs of exotic places, we still don’t see eye to eye on aesthetic issues, but I have learned the value of whitespace and letting images breath.

Anyway, I bet you want to see the album. You can have a look at the preview here. As always you’re welcome to leave a comment.

Edited: I’m a big fan of Kathy Sierra and one of this blog’s readers pointed me to an article by Kathy on the space between notes, where she has a killer explanation for why you need to leave space for the viewer to reflect, process, and co-create the meaning. In my head I still think of it as giving them room to breathe. Thanks for the link Roseanne.

I’ve been getting many compliments and some questions about our new albums and the way that we have structured the workflow. If you are new to the site, the process works like this. Once the wedding is over and the photos are all burned to DVD the process of post-production starts. This process involves sharpening the individual photos, adjusting the colours and doing some light touch ups. Then the album design process starts.

There are many reasons for predesigning an album including the fact that most brides have better things to do than to put together a wedding album out of proofs. The most important reason for us however, is that it gives us the control to design the best possible album from your wedding. We have struggled with this for a number of years now. We take photos to tell the story of the day, however often our clients end up choosing a lot of standard photos – why would you choose a semi-blurry photo of your Mom hugging your Dad? Unless it told part of the story. Someone once told me that it was like getting an author to write the story of your life and then getting all the words individually in a box.

The solution is obviously to offer albums and design them ourselves. So we looked around and saw the various options that are on offer in South Africa, and decided that we just didn’t see our photos in those sorts of albums. So we did our research and were happy to discover two options that we are very happy with, a coffee table solution from the US and a more traditional matted album from Australia. The next step was to figure out how we are going to allow brides to be involved in the process of creating an album but at the same time be able to shape our vision of the story of the day. Not all clients understand the type of images I take and how essential they are to tell a full story. But when you predesign the album, you can use all the offbeat angles, casual and obscure journalistic moments, interesting set and establishing shots, and weave them into a beautiful album that has all the subtle nuances that make every wedding unique. My brides seem to understand all the shots we include when they see them in the context of an album where the cool images become essential elements to the pacing and storytelling of the album. At that point, the couple has the option of making small changes to the album. Including images that have sentimental value or just because they love a photo, or even removing a photo that they are unhappy with. We try to restrict these to things that the couple can’t live with/without.

I find that when the couple starts with blank album that needs to be filled they generally pick a lot of my standard shots and leave out a lot of the cool stuff that doesn’t always make sense on its own, and the album becomes more generic. When I predesign, I create a fuller album that tells more of the story of the day. Even when the couple make a lot of changes to the album, its still a better album than if we hadn’t predesigned.

Although we offer set sizes in the albums, 40pg and 60pg albums, we tend to design albums with more pages and images than we contract for. This allows the couples to make more choices in terms of image swaps, removing pages and just gives them more of an idea of what is possible. For me its about making sure the couple walks away with the best product and display of the story of their wedding day.

One last comment, if you are looking at wedding photographers and you like someone’s photos but their albums are not your style, try and get a photographs only package. Most will be happy to accomodate and you should choose your photographer on the quality of his or her photography rather than the type of album that they offer. We do offer our photographs only package and there are people who prefer it.

The last two weeks have been incredibly busy and I’ve been getting very little sleep trying to catch up on the last two month’s weddings. The weddings season for us stretches from September to April, with March/April and September/October being our two busiest periods. Things are starting to quiten down though and if I promised to get back to you I will do so in the next week or so. During a rather hectic weekend I did manage to edit the wedding from two weeks ago and I just finished designing a new sample album for the studio from it. The were so many great photos from this wedding that I ended up designing an 80 page sample album. The album size will be 10×10 and of course it will be a coffee table style album.

I’ve been really getting into the simple, clean design aesthetic. I think it works well with my photography. Some sample albums I see from other photographers are so busy and I think it distracts from the actual photographs, while others appear to be just photographs placed on pages – one per page. – which really doesn’t do the event any justice.

After many years of thinking that as a photographic studio what we do is make photographs, we have recently added a range of photo albums and coffee table books to our packages. Well, there was another reason it has taken so long to get to this point. We had a look around at some of the albums available in South Africa, you know the Henzos, the imported italian albums, and other offerings available locally and decided that they weren’t of the quality that we’d want to be associated with. So we have been looking around and have settled on two different albums which we are importing from the US and Australia.
The first is a hardcover coffee table book with a dustcover and presented in a red or black slipcase.

The second is a monster in black leather, custom made pages, matted and weighing in at over 8kg. I don’t believe you’ll find anything this stylish and exclusive anywhere else. Photo still to come.

So why should you get an album from us rather than doing it yourself? I quite like this article as a response.