Here’s the thing – if you are planning your wedding, you have spent a huge amount of time and money picking out and paying for every… single… last… detail of your wedding day. Often, paying for your wedding photographer and the services and products your wedding photographer provides comes after several other (often surprisingly expensive) aspects of your wedding day have been picked out. Your budget is shrinking. You’ve signed lots of contracts and written lots of deposit checks. And now your favorite photographer (who is also expensive… isn’t anything about this day going to be affordable?!?) wants you to pay for a wedding album as well. Well… decisions have to made, money has to be saved, something has to give somewhere! So, the decision is made to go with a photography package that doesn’t include an album. You tell yourself that you will design your own album later, or that you only want digital files anyway.
Here’s the thing. Discs go bad. Hard drives crash. You buy a new computer and never get around to transferring the files from the old one. You and your new husband get really busy with making this new and amazing and very, very busy life together. Those discs of over one thousand photos that you got from your wedding photographer haven’t been touched since you got them in the mail. Who wants to sort through over one thousand photos?! Jump ahead five years. You’ve moved a couple of times, boxed and unboxed everything you own (including those discs), life is even busier than it was right after you got married. Every anniversary you think to yourself, “It would be great to look through those photos”… wherever they are. Your wedding photographer only kept backups of the images for two years after the wedding. You’re pretty sure you know where those discs are… you think. You have no photos of your wedding day framed and hanging in your house. You have no album.
It’s not like my wife and I look through our wedding album once a week or anything! But a couple of times a year? Yeah, definitely. It has a prominent place on our bookcase. When we have moved, it got wrapped in bubble wrap and put in a box that we know we are going to actually unpack when we get in our new house (we usually end up sitting on the floor, flipping through it when we unpack it). I have several hard drives and discs of old photos. Never look at them.
My wife never wears her wedding dress, it is sealed in a box that apparently could last until the end of civilization. Our daughters won’t wear it at their weddings (yours won’t either – how do I know? You’re not going to wear your mom’s dress, are you?). It will sit in that box forever, unseen. The cake is gone, the food eaten, the alcohol consumed, the amazing tent and lighting has since been packed up. That amazing honeymoon trip is over. You have your ring, your photos, your memories, and your husband. And if you didn’t get an album, the photos will sit on those discs until the discs fail (in about 5 years, 10 if you are lucky) and then you won’t have any photos.
Your wedding album is the chronicle of the day you and your husband began a lifelong journey together. If you have a professional photographer, he or she will provide you with an album that is a visual narrative that tells the story of this most important day. It will last for 100 years and beyond. Your children will, at some point, want to see it. You will want to see it. No one will want to load up a couple of discs that contain over 1ooo unsorted, unretouched, unedited images and try to find the good ones.
A professional photographer (or in my case, my incredibly talented retoucher/designer and I) will select, edit, retouch, layout, and design a beautiful, archival, visual chronicle that will preserve for you and your kids and your kids kids the story of the day that you and the person you love more than anyone in the world held hands, kissed, and swore to be together forever in front of everyone who was important to you. Your wedding album is the one thing that you paid for when planning your wedding that lasts past the wedding day. And, if it was professionally printed and bound, it will last for generations. It is the one record you have of all of the details you worked so hard to pull together.
My wife and I have been married for over ten years now (yay!). We have had amazing adventures together, but none of it compares to how amazing our wedding day was.
I am passionate about wedding photography (and wedding albums, obviously!) because I am good at it and I believe it to be one of the most important parts of your wedding. It is more than just snapshots of what happened. We create an archival visual chronicle of a day that changes your life. Don’t overlook how important that is.
