With the majority of wedding photography today being captured digitally, many couples want — and oftentimes expect — digital images on disc as their final product. This gives them the flexibility to share their photos electronically and to produce prints on their own. Couples today also have the capability to design and order their own wedding albums using intuitive desktop and/or web-based applications at attractive prices.
To my knowledge, however, discs typically end up being stored on a shelf or in a drawer without much actually being done to the images other than sharing a small selection online. And as intuitive as the do-it-yourself album design applications are, many couples postpone the process for months after their wedding. Even when clients order their wedding albums from their photographer, it’s not uncommon for years to go by before they’ve selected their wedding album images. Whether or not a client designs their own wedding album, this tells me that wedding albums are indeed important to them.
From what I know with my clients, as happy as they were with their proofs, they realized an unexpected, higher level of fulfillment when they received their album. I honestly believe there is no better presentation of wedding day photos than a wedding album. As far as I know, whenever my clients want to revisit the memories of their wedding day, they naturally turn to their wedding album first.
Let’s take a moment to look at the psychology of hiring a wedding photographer, starting with what clients want and expect.
In general, when a couple is looking to hire a wedding photographer, this is what they want:
- Full-day coverage
- All of the high-resolution files on disc
Sounds familiar, right?
Now, consider this analogy for a deliverable when a couple hires a videographer or cinematographer:
- Full-day coverage
- The raw footage on DVDs
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know too many clients who request raw footage of their wedding video. 🙂 Video editing is a service that is expected of a videographer.
Just as a wedding photographer is hired because of his visual storytelling capabilities, a videographer is hired because a couple loves her 15-minute demo produced from hours of footage. The demo, like a wedding album, is a representation of the videographer’s unique application of photography, editing, and special effects.
When a couple receives hundreds — if not thousands — of images on discs, they are simply overwhelmed. While they might enjoy looking through them for hours, making even more time to select a group of images to form a story can be quite a daunting task. It really is no wonder that it could take them years to decide what to include in their wedding album. And even if they made the time to produce their own wedding album, it would never be the same as how the photographer would design it.
That last part is key when you consider that many wedding clients hire photographers based on their album designs.
If you think about it, people don’t hire wedding photographers after viewing hundreds of photos from a wedding. They hire wedding photographers based on their experience from viewing portfolio-grade images, high-quality prints, and carefully-designed albums. So when a couple hires a photographer based on album designs and receives an entirely different product (i.e., hundreds of photos on a disc), the presentation is not ideal. While they may have hundreds of beautiful images, the potential of the photographer’s visionary execution (i.e., the “artful story” that the photographer was hired to produce) is left incomplete.
Modern album designs combine full-bleed images as well as a good amount of negative space.
I can honestly say that while my clients are initially attracted to my work based on my portfolio, many of them hire me because of the way I present stories through my images. And these stories are presented through wedding albums. There are two key elements of a wedding album — a visual story and the design of that story. It’s one thing to pick the right images to tell a story, but it’s another thing to lay them out and present them in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
When meeting with wedding photographers, be sure to see their album designs. Wedding photography is much more than just great photos! 🙂
For further reading, see also: Is a Second Photographer Necessary?
What next?
- If you’re a former wedding client of mine who has yet to order an album, contact me to inquire about some new amazing album offerings
- If you’re looking for a photographer, inquire to learn how I make all my clients completely happy from the start
- If you haven’t already done so, visit my portfolio site
