Weddingbee Blog

I’m popping in again because I’m so excited to share this with you…

Our wedding album has arrived (and only 18 months after the wedding!). A really long time ago, I blogged about how in love we were with the $1000 (or +) albums offered through our photographer. They were amazing. Seriously amazing.

But after the wedding was over and we were thinking about albums (well, mostly I was thinking about albums…), I decided that an album like that probably wasn’t right for us. My reasoning? I wanted to include our wedding, our cake cutting (which was in our home and had no pro photographer), our family/friends picnic reception (which was on a different day and also had no pro photographer), and our honeymoon (which of course had no pro photog tagging along!). In addition, I’ve also cropped, retouched, and otherwise edited a lot of the professional wedding photos after receiving them from the photographer. Don’t get me wrong: Shawna and Kory did an excellent job editing the photos. But I have personal preferences (can we call them “hang ups?”) when it come to pictures of me, so I put in a bit of time making the photos look exactly how I wanted them.

While our photographer was really wonderful to work with, easygoing and just an all around great person, I wasn’t sure how keen she’d be on having more than half of the photos in album she’d create being someone else’s work (mostly mine and Mr. MJ’s). Also, I wanted full—and I mean full—creative control of the layouts. If I wanted to make the album I envisioned happen–with the fancy pantsy albums our photographer had to offer—I bet she and I could have worked something out. But I didn’t want to be a pest.

I also decided not to pursue it because our priorities don’t dictate spending that much on an album. I could see doing it if we had lots of people coming over, looking through our album on a regular basis, and if it was something we planned to display centrally in our home. It isn’t. It’s going to go on a shelf in my barrister bookcase with all of the other picture albums, and will probably only be brought out on rare occasions (if someone asks, or if we decide to take a walk down memory lane that doesn’t involve our online photo albums). As much as we loved those luxurious albums our photographer had to offer, we couldn’t justify the expenditure for something that would be admired so rarely.

So it was decided that I’d make an album and order it online. I have experience with Shutterfly photo books (I made some for our parents and grandparents as gifts for Christmas after our wedding), but I didn’t want to go that route this time. I had bought one for us at the same time, and even though it was okay, I really wanted something snazzier (and inclusive of our honeymoon photos) for our own keepsake.

My main issue with Shutterfly, by the way, was quality control. I don’t think a human actually looks at the album before it’s sent out. The words didn’t align properly on the binder, and some of the coloring was a little funky. Also, it didn’t have lay-flat pages. (Shutterfly doesn’t claim to have this feature, so I did not expect those books to have it. But I later decided I really wanted that feature for our album!!) I would certainly order a Shutterfly album again in the future, but not for something as important as a wedding keepsake.

I set out on a search for the best online wedding album. And I found the best resource ever. You want detailed album reviews? Check out this Photo Book Round Up from Digital Home Thoughts.

I ultimately chose AdoramaPix for our album. I picked it because I could fully customize the layout, it had the lay flat pages, and it offered photo-wrap covers. I knew I could fit our album into 50 pages, so that limit wasn’t an issue. And AdoramaPix is regularly reviewed as one of the best consumer printing resources. Great color, great clarity, just excellent work.

My second choice was MyPublisher (although I had been tied to having a photo wrap cover, I really liked their linen cover choices!). The only reason I didn’t go with MyPublisher was that they didn’t have size of book I liked. The 9 x 12 book (landscape) seemed too small (height wise); the 12×15 seemed too big. (I knew it’d be too big for our shelf; plus since many of our photos did not come out of a truly professional camera (designed for large format), I was worried I couldn’t do any full spreads of honeymoon photos. (We do have a dSLR camera, but not all cameras are created equal. Most professional photographers shoot with very high quality gear; our older consumer level camera can’t compete with that.) I might choose MyPublisher in the future for another project though! I did really like their cover options, among other features.

With the company decided on, I made the AdoramaPix book (back in November 2010). I fully customized every layout, starting from blank on each page. It was a lot of grueling work to line everything up, even with the help of their alignment tools. It took me a very long time to make this album. I must say though: waiting a while to make your wedding album is the best idea ever. Really: when you look back at your wedding pictures after time has passed, you will find new things you like about certain ones. You’ll notice photos now that you had previously skipped over in a giddy blur. You might realize that some of the photos you loved at first, really aren’t your favorites at all. Our new album contains photos the parent albums don’t have. Photos most people (aside from our photographers of course!) have never seen before. And that’s because I just didn’t see them the same way back in 2009. When I looked again a year later, I fell in love with a bunch of new ones.

Anyway, I made the album in November, saved it, and waited. Adorama photo books aren’t cheap, and I wanted a sale to pop up. Silly me made my album just weeks after they had a sweet 20% off sale on all books. Dang. December passed. Then January. Then most of February before finally, I saw an announcement from them on Facebook: photo books discounted! Woohoo! Between the discount and a $10 credit I ’earned’ for becoming a new account member, I got my 12×12 flush mount 50 page photo book–normally $160–for $93.

Enough blabber! Here’s the book!

(Cover image by Shawna Noel Photography)

The cover is done in a pearly finish. It’s almost metallic looking. Very cool. I put our names and wedding date on the front; on the back I listed the “where and whens” of the events that are contained in the album. (Ignore my smeary fingerprints on the back–whoops. Me and my grubby little hands.)

(’Wedding’ image by Shawna Noel Photography; ’Reception’ image by family member; ’Honeymoon’ image by Mr. MJ.)

Here comes my *only* complaint about the quality of the book. Check this out.

(Image in this spread by Shawna Noel Photography)

That’s the inside of the front cover. The pages that are mounted to the front and the back covers count as 2 of the 50 allotted pages. And they’re kind of screwy. It’s not horrible, but it isn’t terribly professional either. You can see the lumpiness of the cover-wrap image–it shows through the front and back pages. The way the front page is attached is what irked me most:

(Image in this spread by Shawna Noel Photography)

It is too tightly glued, I think. If you open the book all the way, it stretches and this page peels up (on the top and the bottom–you are seeing the bottom in the picture). That’s really not cool. I don’t think it’s worth returning the book over, but it’s something to note. I had seen a few other people write reviews about minor issues with binding, so I was half-expecting this kind of thing anyway. Besides, this was a $100 book, not a $1000 book, right? (But still, even Shutterfly papers the front and back covers, starting your book on a page that isn’t glued to the binding…)

Oh, and some of my pictures were printed a little bit duller than I think they should be.

Oddly, this only happened with the photos we took. (The pro photos printed perfectly.) I should note that I turned OFF their color-correction because I generally like my own coloring better. The dullness isn’t noticeable to anyone except me, and it’s very slight, so I decided not to care too much. Maybe if I’d agreed to their color correction, it wouldn’t have happened…who knows. But I made a mental note: bump saturation on future AdoramaPix orders. (I stored that one right next to my mental note about bumping brightness by 15% on anything I print from Shutterfly….).

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: I got that image of our plane tickets into the book by scanning them at a very high resolution on our color scanner as a JPG image. Then, I just gave them a black background and ended up with what looked like a photo of two plane tickets on a black background!

The pages are not super duper thick (like a true pro album). But they’re thick enough I think.

I’d say they’re thicker than cardstock, but not a lot thicker. Here are the pages laying flat.

(Images in this spread by Shawna Noel Photography)

(Rings image by me; Bouquet image by Shawna Noel Photography.)

And here’s a peek at some of the layouts I created for the photos we took on our honeymoon. (All of the photos in the spreads below were taken by me or Mr. Mary Jane.)

Here’s the back page. (The back page binding/gluing actually came out much better than the front page, but you can still see the ’ridge’ where the cover is folded under the back page and glued.)

All in all, I love our album!! It’s a great memorial to our wedding, reception and honeymoon. The price was affordable and the overall quality is very good (especially for the price)! In the words of eBay buyers: A++, would order again. My only advice? Next time, I’d think of it as a 48 page album and simply put some sort of pattern on the first and last page. I really wouldn’t care about the lumpy binding if it was a blank or otherwise unadorned page that was affected.

Mr. MJ and I both agreed that it was really fun to page through the album after it arrived. Ah, memories! Did you, or do you plan to make your own album?