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.