For most of you, a wedding album is what it is all about for your big day. A single place to go to and show off the day, bring back memories and visit a moment in time. With nearly 60% of all our clients opting to get an album, we thought we would create a blog about how to select your images as well as show some more options on what they look like.
First, what are your options? We make flush mount and lay-flat albums. What's the difference? At first glance it is hard to see, but overall flush mount albums cost more to make, use thicker pages to make them more rigid and stand the test of time, are made with real leather binding and allow for more options for the covers as well as the printed pages. Design wise, they are identical.
Let us show you a flush mount album we just designed for our demo book we are making for open houses at the Thursday Club in La Cañada, CA. If you would like to see it, just ask us and we can let you know when the next open house is taking place. It's always on Sunday each month, and we'd love to see you.
Below is an example of a flush mont album. It's called a flush because each page or spread spans across both open pages. So one print is covering two pages with a fold or crease in the middle. The images are placed or designed as they are needed to tell the story based on your selections of key moments from the day that help tell the story of what happened. Some choose to only include themselves, the couple, and others choose to have a ton of family and other elements like their dress. We don't use templates so each album is unique.
As you flip through the album, you will notice that the cover has a beveled glass cover. It is very unique and makes the album even heavier, but it feels and looks so nice. This album is designed to be a 12x12 square album so when it opens the two pages will be 24x12 inches - it's big! You will also notice that the albums is designed using both classic as well as modern page designs. Some have squared off "boxes" around each image and others have images that look as if they were dropped there or are floating on top of the main page print. Others look like a polaroid with a small frame around them. Now it is hard to tell, but this album will be printed with a very very glossy metal oxide print. It makes the photos look wet but it adds a ton of depth. I will post images of it when I get it in the next few days. We are hoping to have it to show at the open house this coming Sunday. We also have one that you can see up at the La Cañada Country Club already and the lay flat version is at Bridal and Special Times dress shop below our office in Pasadena that has more traditional mat finish photos, like what you got when you did your senior portraits for high school and we also have versions like that at the Thursday Club as well, just of different events.
Here are the current options for the outside cover. Either leather or leatherette. We can also do a linen as well and if interested just let us know. First set is leather. Second two sets are leatherette.
Leather Color Options
Leatherette Color Options
As we mentioned before, below shows the difference in papers we print on for the pages. First is the metallic oxide print. The second one is more common lustre or mat print.
Metallic Oxide
Lustre Print
Album size options vary as do their pricing. The larger the album, the more pages it has and what it is made of all add to the cost and the overall quality of the albums. Lay-flat albums tend to be 12 x 12 and around 50 pages which would hold around 75-85 images. Flush mount albums are a maximum of 50 pages unless thinner substrates are used and because of costs tend to be smaller but they can be made into the larger sizes. As we design your album the size ( 10x10 or 12x12) etc doesn't matter since they are square and the same ratio. If we make a 16x12 or an 11x14 we cannot easily adapt that back to another design since the pages are different sizes. Since the mid 2010's square albums are most common, but again, it is up to you. The leather bound flush mount example shown here with the crystal glass cover is approximately $850 at the time of this writing. Production costs have been, like every thing else as you know, steadily going up so we will come back and update this as needed from time to time. The same album without the glass cover in leatherette would run around $500.
Lastly, when it comes to selecting your photos keep in mind that it is really up to you. The more photos of a time of the day will either make us design it over more pages or smaller images. You will notice the photos of guests with the couple. Those can take 2-3 spreads sometimes or if you are making a larger size album we can add more of them to a single spread so they are still large enough to view. We are happy to take your input but we do include you in the design and you always have the final say. Photojournalistic images or candids often take key moments and allow for a single image to span the 2 pages. Other times we drop other images around it as it were photos on your coffee table. Family photos and portraits tend to be clustered together in more regimented display, but we have made some of those more scattered. You don't get to see each photo that way in its entirety but its a pretty cool look.
Questions? Please let us know and we hope you found this insightful.
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