This week instead of wedding, engagement, family, or newborn photography, we decided to share with you some perks of hiring a Full Service Photography Studio (namely in regard to getting a professional photo album made). We create physical professionally printed high end photographs, photo products, and wedding albums/ other photo albums for our clients (and have done so for 8 years- weekly it seems for the past 3 months), so we’re pretty tuned in to what Professional photo products should look like and be.
We ARE a Full Service Studio L.L.C. (not freelancers) and we DO make a plethora of physical products for our couples and other clients. We’ve been making physical wedding albums since 8 years ago (within our past 10 years of photographing weddings) and moved to FULL SERVICE ONLY fully 5 years ago). A large portion of our business is high end physical ALBUMS as many are included in different wedding packages that we offer! These albums are not your run-of-the-mill cheap, thin, glossy album that you can get from Shutterstock, CostCo, CVS, or the like. They’re actually not cheap at all (they cost us a pretty penny to make) and require that you have design programs on your computer in order to create the design of the whole album. Our albums are archival, have an array of different cover options (something like 25+ options), and we are design gurus at this point. We don’t charge additionally to DESIGN the albums (since we’ve already charge clients for the Service of Photography), though many professional photography studios do (and it is good business practice to charge for designing entire album layouts). We do charge for the albums size, thickness, and style, though.
We’ve rarely shown or even photographed the past albums that we’ve made our couples and clients over the years since we have physical sample albums in our Consultation Office, but in the past couple months we’ve realized that it’s something that we needed to do in order to show those of you who haven’t been to our physical consultation offices or studio what exactly is being invested in when we create these gorgeous albums! We create these albums for engagements, families, weddings, anniversaries, newborns, and more. We take great pride in creating these high quality albums that not only outshine, but outlast cheap, thin paged albums with sub-par, non-archival printing. Our end goal is to create for our clients gorgeous, sturdy albums that will withstand the test of time and be able to be cherished and passed down through the generations. Without further adieu, here are some of our clients’ beautiful albums that we’ve created!
The first thing you may have noticed is that the pages of our albums aren’t thin and cheap and don’t “rainbow” bend like magazine pages when the album is opened. This is because we use think, thick photo paper card stock… and actually just upped the thickness even more at the start of 2019! We also invest in fonts (and pay for literal artist hand drawn fonts for cards), so we have a good array of fonts that we use on the photo cover album designs. Since we have many legitimate art degrees (MFAs are bomb!) we do have a good sense of design. This helps immensely when we’re putting peoples’ chosen photos into album layouts based on what looks good to our eyes and what we thinks helps the album “flow” the best. We do NOT use album templates that are pre-made and instead hand design each album layout based on what photos our clients and couples choose from our photographs of them. We even restore old vintage photos for families and couples and on top of that either completely re-design their original albums to print into a new, color and quality restored album OR take old paper photos, film negatives, and slides and design those into a brand new album of one’s memories!
We’ve learned a lot both through our degrees in Professional Photography about printing AND through our experience of running a full service studio/ photography business and we are proud of the end product album that we send out to our clients. (It’s made even more satisfying for us all to enjoy the gorgeous end product after the whole process of sending proofs back-and-forth as we go through the process of updating and changing layouts, photos, and the album designs per our couples’ requests)! It’s not easy work or a click of the button as it is for cheap albums from CVS, BUT it’s all worth the hard work when we get back amazing emails from clients saying that they cried when they opened their beautiful archival box and held the big, gorgeous album. These are memories that our amazing client families will pass down through the generations. The world of high end physical photographs isn’t dead… but you do have to search long and hard for the right professional Full Service Studio that can provide you with the photography, design, and quality product producing skills that oh so many lack.
We hope you enjoyed seeing just a bit of what we do and the lengths that we go to to ensure quality photography products for all of our lovely clients! Check back NEXT weekly Wednesday to learn a bit more about us, our relationship, and more about our many, many years together-! Stay warm as we get muddy and rained on (with that literal 80 degree upswing in temperatures since the Polar Vortex just one week ago today)!