Click! Click! Click! The camera went capturing the proceedings of my brother’s wedding diaries– from marriage stills to Indian couple images to bridal portraits, the camera framed everything. Almost a month later, when the soft copy of the photos landed on our hands, we were confused about which wedding photo album could help us preserve the photographs properly. After all, the wedding day is one of the important days in an individual’s life. To hold all the shots of the wedding ceremony, the wedding album is a perfect option.
Wedding albums are meant to uphold the precious memories of the wedding ceremony. It comes in all shapes and sizes and printing options. These are lifetime assets preserving them correctly is quite an important task. Along with selecting the ones that we wanted on the wedding album, we were equally bothered about which type of wedding album we should choose.
We were naive in this matter and had the least idea that there could exist so many types of photo album for the wedding. Few types that we came across were-
Flush Mount Wedding Album Design
These are the advanced style of the album available in the market. This is the most ‘in demand’ Indian wedding album design and popular with brides and photographers. They have “hardcovers” and “board type” pages. The photos are dry-mounted on cardboard and lie completely flat extending across the entire page. All pages of these type of album are border-less with photographic print which includes one or more images.
Coffee Table Wedding Album Design
This type of wedding album is the most unique and modern that you will take pride in to display on your coffee table to share with family & friends. The quality of coffee-table books depends on the type of paper being used. Coffee table wedding albums are usually over-sized, expensive, and an illustrated book suitable for displaying on a coffee table view & fondly browse regularly to memorize one of the most special days
Soft Cover Wedding Album Design
Softcover album is more a casual wedding album, available in different sizes and normally will have your good images on the cover. It is a great gift for a wedding party or grandparents, but they are not a high-quality album. If your budget is low you can use Hard Cover Albums.
Matted Wedding Album Design
Picture Credit -: priscillafosterhandmade
This album comes with a thick heavy leather cover in a variety of colour options and has cameo opening for an image. Matted wedding photo albums come with recessed frames, in which each photo is hand-mounted. The photos are digitally or traditionally printed and can also be changed after the completion of the album
Parent or Gift Albums
Picture Credit-: handmade_picks
Parent or gift wedding photo albums are scaled-down versions of your main wedding album. They might include all the same pictures but just be smaller, or they may contain a few selected pictures. Parent albums tend to be around 20cm square, and as the name suggests they make an ideal present for the parents of the bride and groom. Gift books are often available in a smaller size and make perfect thank you presents for your maid of honor, bridesmaids, or best man.
Digital Photo Albums
As the name suggests, these albums use digital technology and can come in a variety of forms, from being uploaded onto the internet to digital devices that store images, even mobile phones. With technological advancement, this type of marriage albums has gained much recognition due to their easy accessibility and low cost.
Some online websites even allow users to edit the pictures; with varied layouts, sizes, designs, and many more options. Users can add a description of the pictures, comment and share it with almost anyone across the world.
However, a disadvantage of this wedding album type is that anyone can get hold of the pictures and tamper them, edit to produce images that may be offensive to the user. The authenticity of the image also decreases as they can claim the picture to be theirs as they can simply take it off the net.
Once you have decided on the wedding album type, it is now time to choose the suitable wedding album cover.
There are four steps for you to choose your Indian wedding album cover–
- Choose your cover material
- Decide your photo album front cover, i.e do you want the cover with or without your photo
- Decide how you want your name to appear.
- Choose your wedding date format.
Cover material
The material that you choose reflects your style and personality. The feel of the material is also very much important.
Personalization
You can personalize your album cover with or without your photo, also there are different ways that you can incorporate the photos, like, you can choose- white text and black frame photo, black text and white frame photo, vertical photo with no text, square photo with text. You can also choose your cover motif color from black, ivory, silver, and gold.
Name format
Choose how you want your name to appear on the album cover, for e.g, Julie + Robin or Julie & Robin.
Date format
Choose how you want your wedding date to appear on the album cover, for instance, – 15/1/2017 or January 15, 2017.
Next comes the background. Choosing the background for the Indian bridal photos album is difficult. You should choose an album that would go hand in hand with the album type and the photos that have been chosen. There are hundreds of background styles that you can choose from.
Once you are done with the three basic steps to choose the correct wedding album, you now have to design your album to make it the best of the lot. Here are a few tips for you, that will help you design your wedding album-
Choose your favorite pictures
Leave aside the ones which you need to think twice with. Make your album an emotional record, not a technical one. Pick photos you can’t live without. The best album is a collection of your favorite pictures.
Let the photos speak
With the digital age, we can do a lot of tricky things in laying out albums. One tip: Put a vertical image on one page and stretch a horizontal image across two pages.
Go Chronological
In general, ceremony photos should go in order. But you can definitely start with an amazing image from later in the day.
Layout one spread at a time
Let your album create poetry. More important than the order is the flow of the images is more important. Just like a magazine, an album is made up of spreads. Think about each spread (or two pages) as a whole. The pages need to relate to one another by content or style.
Make it colorful
There is no hard and fast rule for choosing a color or black-and-white images. It depends on the wedding if it has been a very colorful wedding, the majority of the images will be in color. If it has been a very minimal wedding most of the pictures will be black-and-white.
Have photos that represent the big ceremony moments
Your wedding album should consist of the key moments like the bride or groom walking back down the aisle, the exchange of rings, the kiss and the overall theme of the ceremony are “must-have” shots. It is important to get images from this critical part of the day, so if you overlooked those items in your initial batch of favorites, go back and look for more to include.
Don’t delay in choosing your wedding album
Order your wedding album right away instead of waiting for a couple of years. The earlier you order though, the better. Send in your must-have shots, then let your wedding photographer draft a layout using some extra photos to help the flow and you’ll meet again to review the draft.
Match the album size to your wedding weekend
Albums should be to scale with how big the wedding is. An intimate, shorter wedding wouldn’t need as many pictures as a 4-day affair. It is not that you have to overfill your album. In addition to your album, make or order a proof book of all your shots.
Decorate your walls too
The prints that you put in your album should also be on your walls. Pick the favourite shots of the day, the ones you connect with most.
Display your wedding album where it can be enjoyed
Leaving your album out on a coffee table is fine since people understand the “certain sacredness” to wedding albums so it won’t be treated as a coaster. However, make sure to keep it away from little toddlers with dirty fingers and away from direct sunlight.
Wedding albums- from then to now!
Wedding albums have transformed for good. Gone are the days when we used to have huge heavy wedding albums filled with black and white photos of the coy bride-groom. Have you ever seen your parents’ or grandparents’ wedding photos?
There are high chances that they were printed on photographic paper either as individual prints or presented in a wedding album. They’re priceless family heirlooms and likely to outlast much of today’s wedding photography.
However, the digital photography revolution has ushered in the decline of the traditional model of wedding photography. In the film era, photographers were providers of both products and services; they were also the sole owners of the negatives, without which additional copies were difficult to reproduce. Couples relied exclusively on wedding photographers for photos, albums, and framed prints.
The digital revolution has changed things drastically, making it possible for some bargain photographers to operate exclusively as service providers without ever having to sell a physical print.
Under mounting consumer pressure, the old-schoolers tried but ultimately failed, to maintain the old model of doing business. Savvy clients expected digital copies of their wedding photographs in high-resolution and with a license to print them to their hearts’ content.
We find ourselves in a situation where wedding photography print sales have declined. The unfortunate consequence is that wedding photographs – most photographs, actually – are increasingly relegated to an abstract realm of zeroes and ones; they see little hope of being converted into a format that is viewable in the most basic of manners: eyes looking at paper, unaided by the interpretive layers of software operating within a structured electrical storm
Disadvantages of digital photo wedding albums
The harsh truth about digital media is that it exists within a state of fragility. An accidental push of a button, a spill of a coffee, stray malware, or an unfortunate power surge can spell doom for your precious files.
Depending on the nature of the damage, recovery can either be expensive or impossible. This isn’t fear-mongering: it is the reality of digital asset management, and the reason why professionals from all walks – wedding photographers included – are keen on data redundancy.
How long will your photos truly last and be appreciated if you don’t print them? Let’s recall your parents’ and grandparents’ wedding photography. They have survived not because they have a sentimental value rather, they exist in a physical form that can be passed down through generations.
Tossing away a box of photos is much more difficult than deleting a soft copy. While the former would need a physical effort, the later can happen to even the most organized person.
In the case of digital wedding photos, their personal significance is completely undermined by their physical insignificance.
Physical destruction and careless deletion aside, the greatest threat to digital information is obsolescence. While storing your wedding photos on multiple storage sites the possibility of inadvertently losing them increases. They are not protected against company bankruptcy, computer hacking, or any other form of loss, both avoidable and unforeseen.
Nor do they offer protection against changing industry standards for cables, connectors and communication protocols. And they definitely don’t offer protection against changing standards of software and the way files are rendered.
Printing your wedding photographs is the simplest method of preservation. When stored in a cool, dry, and dark place, photographs remain stable for several generations.
Given the right combination of environmental factors and time, all dyes will fade. Clearly, permanence is not an option. However, you can give your treasured photographic memories a chance to age gracefully and without the vexations associated with long-term digital storage.
Albums are an ideal storage method for photographic prints, especially snapshots and heirloom photographs–the photographs can be safely stored and organized, and safely viewed, without inflicting damage from frequent handling.
Good albums not only protect your wedding photographs, but they are also a beautiful way to store, view, and present them.
Everything in our life increasingly exists as bits of information – on our hard drives or in ‘the cloud’ in the form of photographs. With the advancement of technology, they have high risks of being lost.
Most of the things in life are reduced to mere memories. Photographs transport us to how things were at that particular moment.
Online Wedding Album Maker
If you are short on budget and choose not to hire a wedding photographer, don’t worry you still can create your wedding album.
A number of sites are available online to help you customize your wedding album. You can choose any from- Milk, Blurb, Adoramapix, BrideBox and many others according to your taste and budget.
Price of wedding albums-
A typical wedding album can be priced on these three primary costs:
- The cost of the wedding album (hard costs)
- The labor/amount of time that goes into designing the wedding album (soft costs),
For a 9″*6″ hardcover matte finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹1000/-
For a 9″*6″ softcover matte finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹900/-
For a 9″*6″ softcover glossy finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹950/-
For a 9″*6″ hardcover glossy finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹1050/-
For a 9″*6″ hardcover scuff-free velvet finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹1120/-
For a 9″*6″ softcover scuff-free velvet finish wedding photo album with 50 pages your range will start from ₹1000/-
Once you are certain about all the factors, you are all set to go ahead to choose the wedding photo album that would suit you best.
