Miss Onion, NYC/Burlington, VT
Age and Occupation: 26, PR & Marketing and Jazz Singer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, Data Analyst
Engagement Date: April 2, 2006
Wedding Date: September 2007
Blogging Since: July 11, 2007
Venue: Restaurant in Burlington
About Me: I didn't think I'd be "that girl," but I am having so much fun planning our wedding (mostly by myself). I'm a PR and Marketing Director for a major jazz festival and camp by day, and by night, a romantic jazz singer and bride-to-be! I hope all my research can help other brides in their planning.
Our Wedding Album
March 27th, 2008 @ 2:34 pm by Mrs. Onion
Like Mrs. Bee, we haven’t ordered our wedding photo album yet. We were married almost 7 months ago and for the last few months our 1900+ photo proofs have been sitting our our sideboard waiting for me to prioritize them.
Daria and Andy Bishop provided us with our proof prints in these nice black archival photo boxes.
There are five of them FULL of lovely proofs. But how do I narrow down almost 2000 photos to 100 or so for our album? I keep thinking I’ll tackle the task over the weekend.
And then the weekend comes and goes….
And here our proofs sit. (I have to admit I dusted them before I took these photos.)
We have started talking with our photographers about a lovely matted Queensbury album (photo sample from www.queensberry.com).
I am very excited to get the ball rolling. Because the album wasn’t included in our package I think we’ve put it off a bit as it will be an expense we’ll have to budget for now. I think a beautiful archival quality wedding album will be something our children and their children will cherish. I know I’m thrilled to have old photos of my family — it gives me a real sense of history and belonging.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Were you quicker to get working on your wedding album if it was included in your photography package?
20 Responses to “Our Wedding Album”
I love your album!! You usually see wedding albums in ivory, but I always think black pages show off the colors of the photos better for some reason. You’re scaring me with the 1900 proofs thing though - although I realize we have hired two photographers for 6 ours, which will be a tremendous number of photos.
I know we would put it off if we had to write another check. Luckily my mom (who is photo album crazy and sure she won’t get adequate documentation of the event otherwise) is paying for the photography and has arranged for the albums as her gift to us and to FI’s parents (and herself, of course. There may also be one for my sister.) So we will have to go through them expediently, or everybody’s gifts will be held up and it will be all our fault and we will look horribly ungrateful. Which would suck.
We’ve been married over 1 1/2 years at this point. I was pretty quick about making little thank-you albums for my two bridesmaids, and then making bigger hardcover albums for our parents, all Apple iPhoto books… and then… yeah. I ran out of steam. Our photographer gave us all digital images and he printed up his 10 favorites into a nice little proof album for us, and that’s the only wedding album we have: 10 pictures.
Do you know if Queensberry works with individuals, or do they only work with professional photographers? I love paging through my parents’ wedding album, which is a nice matted book, but I’m not sure where I can get that for us, since I have all the images and they’re all digital. Any ideas, anyone?
We’ve been married almost 4 months now and I’ve just now thought that maybe I should a) print out some of the photos! and b) start making photo books for our parents and grandparents.
I’d definitely like a nice album for ourselves and our package didn’t include it. The albums our photographer offers start at $1000! Do I really need a “magazine style Italian album”? I really would like something more traditional that will last several lifetimes (which I doubt is the case with a magazine album).
We opted to not get an album through our photographer as part of our package. She only deals with digital printing, and I know I want a traditional matted album. Plus, we decided we would rather put our budget towards the best possible photographer we can afford now, and pay for the album later. We’re in the situation where he is graduating med school this year and has NO income, and I’m just a poor Ph.D. student paying all our bills and for our wedding off my life savings, but we know in the future we’ll be making significantly more money. I know that a lot of people don’t have the guarantee that if they don’t spend the money there, it will be there in a few years, but since we’ll be going from graduate students to a radiologist and a research oncologist, it was the best option for us.
Since we’ll be living apart our first 3 years of marriage, I think that will motivate me to make the album — I won’t get to SEE him more than once a month, but at least I can go through all the pictures and remind myself that the long-distance marriage will be worth it in the end!
We got married July ‘07… and our album was included with our package. For V-day ‘08 (7months later) we went to the photog’s office to finally pick one out… she sent us the online site to proof/pick our pictures and do the layout… it’s almost april (almost 2 months later) and we haven’t even decided on the cover photo yet… at the ratewe’re going, we’re shooting to finish it as a present to ourselves for our 1 year anniversary…
Yes, it made a world of difference to have a photo album included in our wedding package. Luckily they use Queenbury for albums. We received a printed proof book about 1 1/2 months after the wedding. They knew we wanted a flush-mount album that went in chronological order. About a month later, we were sent a link to a sample layout of the entire album. From there I exchanged photos, moved some around and added pages (which we paid extra for). This went back and forth for about 3 versions and within about 3 weeks from viewing the first layout, the final layout was set. Then it took a couple months for that album (and the 2 smaller parent albums — which included all the same photos from ours) to arrive at our doorstep. What made it easy for us is that we had a limited number of pages included in the basic album and the fact that the same photos were also printed in the parent albums, so basically we concentrated on including close family members and not so much all our friends. As we have our digital negatives, a more inclusive self-designed photo album waits in the wings — meaning this is what I’ve been procrastinating on for the last year and a half.
Christmas was what got me moving (7 months after the wedding) - I wanted to gift a copy of the album to my mom 
I just created it in Shutterfly - which is lovely. Maybe one day I’ll order a more traditional album - they are so beautiful!
We had 2 albums included and paid for in our package, but it still took us 2+ years to finally meet up with the photographer to work on our albums. I just happened to call yesterday and the photographer said the albums will probably take another 2 months. So, I should get them in time for our 3rd anniversary! =P
What do you do when your photographer doesn’t do albums? Mine are just in 4×6″ sleeves at this point.
We didn’t have any kind of album in our package. We got several hundred 4×6 proofs and 3 CDs of files, and that was it. All the same, we had a planning album, a wedding-day album, a post-wedding/pre-honeymoon album, and two honeymoon albums done by Thanksgiving the same year as the late-June wedding.
At this point I should mention I used to be a Creative Memories consultant. That being said…
Any project is going to be overwhelming if you look at it as “OMG I have to go through 2000 photos!” Grab an inch-tall stack every night before bed, and set aside the ones you really love. If you understand deep in your heart that that doesn’t mean you’ll never see the other 1900 photos again, it’ll be easier.
OR grab a stack that represents one portion of the event, like the processional, and pick some percentage of them that you feel are the most representative of what you were feeling at the time. Actually, no, saying “pick some percentage” makes it more stringent than it needs to be. Pick what you love.
OR consider that you may have already selected your favorites, by virtue of what you’ve posted to Weddingbee so far.
This is the same advice I gave to a coworker whose family albums were damaged in a flood. Realize that saving (or in your case, including) all of them just isn’t possible, so pick the ones that you love, the ones that grab you, the ones that make you smile.
I was actually dying for a new wedding-related project, after all the post-wedding excitement had died down. So I was eager to get started on my album. Our wedding was in mid-August, and I had my album designed and printed by Christmas! It took a while to pick out the photos, but once I got started it only took a few weeks, start to finish.
We had the option of including a wedding album in our photography package. However, I’m a HUGE scrapbooker, and had the idea of doing the album myself, in the form of a scrapbook. I’m including cards from our guests, and other trinkets from the day. For me it makes it a bit more personal. And it’s a way for me to relive the experience. I will also include pages from my shower and our bachelor/bachelorette parties as well as our honeymoon.
I have an album as part of my package but just a question to everyone….
Wouldn’t it be hard to sort through hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pics to find the ones to put in the album….? I think it’d be hard to narrow everything down. That’s why I was hoping my photographer would help out greatly in that aspect.
I got the prepaid package and 7 months later still haven’t done my album.
my photographers gave me the option of them picking the photos for the album which was included in the package. i just went for that option because seriously, they know more about putting photos together anyhow. it’s also supposed to cut back a lot on production time (about half was what they estimated). i wonder if not all photographers would be willing to do that?
Married almost 9 months and still procrastinating with our album. It’s included in our package and we just can’t get it together to pick our photos. There’s always next weekend. 
hello there! You’re definitely not alone. We’ve been married almost 9 months and still procrastinating with our album. It’s included in our package and we just can’t get it together to pick our photos. There’s always next weekend.
We’re 2 months away from our 1 year anniversary…and no album yet. I *did* do a little Blurb book as an Xmas gift for our wedding party, but I have to confess, the only reason that got done was b/c I used their pre-set layouts and they were offering a discount deal that expired, so I got a fire lit under my @$$ to do it. I also did moo cards, but again, it was a V-day gift for hubs, so there were set deadlines that had to be met. I think my biggest problem is not the money, but the fact that there’s no deadline.
If our photog was doing the album, whether or not it was a part of the package, I think I’d have had it done by now. But, our deal was that we got the files, all 2000 of ‘em, so now I have to not only pick, but edit and design the puppy…sigh.
Mrs. Onion, I am a Vermont girl who has loved following your wedding story…especially now that I am 6 weeks engaged and find MYSELF obsessively, joyfully planning the Big Day! And now here you are, months after the wedding, still with a great project to accomplish, but hesitating–it just doesn’t seem like you, does it? But it’s no surprise to me that you can’t bring yourself to sort through these photos–every one I’ve seen is blow-me-away gorgeous. Yes, it’s true. I’ve become a silent stalker of Daria Bishop Photography. HOW do their photos come out so bright, so crisp, so poignant, so…capturing all the perfect moments? Take your time with them, go at your own pace, but I suspect that no matter what you do, the album will come out great. (Now, I know it was worth it, but come clean: was it hard to spend that much on them? Yikes!)
glad to know we’re not alone! UPDATE: mr. onion and i sat down tonight and went through all 5 boxes of photos and made an “album worthy” pile and a “no” pile. in one go we were able to narrow it down to just over 200 photos! hooray. now when we talk to daria and andy again we’ll have a better sense — i’m pretty confident we can get it down to 150….but more than that will start to get difficult.
weebear — hooray for another vermont bride. i’m so glad you’ve enjoyed folloing my planning and wedding. congratulations on your engagement — i would love to hear all about your plans. email me with any burlington vendor questions. as for daria and andy, it was totally worth it. the photography was one of my top 3 priorities and we hired them in sept 06 for our sept 07 wedding. then they weren’t including albums in their packages so it was a little less expensive, but now of course we’ll have to pay for our album. would i have liked to spend less on photography? sure. but i am 100% happy with the choice and i was when i made it as well. remember, the engagement session comes with the price and the second shooter (her talented and sweet as pie husband).
