I just got done designing Annie & Mike’s Italian Bound coffee table book. Designing wedding albums is one of my favorite “jobs” other then shooting! It’s always so rewarding to see the images we capture come together and tell our couple’s story!   The design process usually begins with selection photographs, our clients choose some of their favorite wedding photos and we choose some of ours.  Then comes hours (sometimes days) or art-working images, creating spreads and digitally stitching together a virtual proof of what will someday become a priceless family heirloom.  We are obviously engulfed in a digital age, where the vast majority of photographs never reach a solid state of print.  We’re of course guilty of this as most of our personal pictures live on drives.  This is great for a lot of reason, it’s easy to catalog them, it saves space (and for us) we can easily manipulate them at a later date.  We’ve found though that all of this convenience hasn’t caused us to shun printed work, but to appreciate it far more.    No digital display or images will ever top a quality photo professionally printed, either to be hung on the wall or as in this case in an amazing album.  And for us personally it’s the marquee or milestone images, the really strong photos and amazing moments that find their ways into print.  Printing for us isn’t for a mediocre photo or snap shot, it’s something we save for the best of the best, and because of this these photos shine far more and garner an appreciation they wouldn’t receive on our iPad screen or our computer monitor. But getting back to album design, once we get an approval on the print we say good bye as we send our work off to good hands with our publisher.   You know how dogs ears are super sensitive to UPS trucks?  They hear them a mile away.  Well that’s sort of what’s happened to us because when our UPS driver pulls up, it’s generally with a box full of pure printed goodness!  There are days when I know albums are arriving and I about tackle our driver to get the box open and flip through the pages!  It’s seeing our work in the printed state that brings us the most gratification, because for us it’s knowing that we not only took a great photo, but it was appreciated enough to find it’s way into print.

After laying out Mike & Annie’s book and “oohing and ahhing” at some of the great shots Derrick captured, I thought I should share some of my favorites from their wedding day. Their wedding  took them from the Inn on the Park, to the Capitol, to the Ale Asylum, then the Press House until finally everyone made their way to the wonderful reception at the Brink Lounge.  Such a great wedding to photograph, album to design, and an even more fabulous couples day to be part of! -April