Weddingbee Blog

This installment of my little series marks the arrival of our “official” photo album from our photographers.

I’ll be completely honest here and say that I initially was not emotionally invested in this album, which is probably really sad and not something most photographers would want to hear.

I’ll fully admit that when we chose our photographers, we placed our priorities more on the personalities of the photographers and their actual photos than on the albums (what good is a beautiful book if you don’t love the photos in it?). Their albums are definitely a part of their artistry and they sell some beautiful products, but we were really stretching to get them at our wedding, and so we could only afford the smallest album they offered. In fact it was so small (just 30 small-ish photos, although beautifully printed) that I just couldn’t get excited about it. Kind of like when you see something expensive, and you love it, but you know you can’t have one, so you don’t let yourself think about it too much.

Luckily, a delay in processing led our photographers to offer us a slightly larger album, which we were excited about.

This is good news for all those photographers I offended a minute ago, because this meant that in the photo-choosing process we really did become attached to this album. This album is very simple, with just one matted image per page, so we decided that it would be more of a “showcase” for our most favorite shots. When I make a larger scrapbook, I’ll use that to really tell the story of the day.

It’s a Cypress album and it is very beautiful. My husband, who has a graduate degree in printmaking, turned it over and over again and declared himself especially impressed with the craftsmanship. Here are some details:

This is the box that the album comes in. The album is inside, and covered with translucent vellum paper.

Our names are embossed on the cover:

You can see the deckled edges here. They are wonderful to touch, also.

I forgot to get a photo of the whole book before I put it away, but it looks very similar to this one.

Though the album is lovely and its presentation is wonderful, there are a couple of things I’d change if I could. Maybe some of you can learn from my mistakes:

First, I declined to order the Cypress fabric swatches, which is totally my fault. The “Platinum” color, which I expected to be, well, platinum, is a brownish beige; it’s still pretty, but quite different from what I expected. Second, the images aren’t quite in the order we envisioned them (we were supposed to have a chance to check it before it went to print, but that somehow never happened), which bothered me at first.

I’ll be honest and say that these issues are magnified, because by the time it arrived, it was a loooong 5 months from the time we placed our order (we were quoted 6 to 8 weeks). Apparently this is a common experience among brides, so you’ve been warned! Of course this meant that our digital photos were delayed as well.

It really didn’t matter much to me (I mean in the long run, I won’t remember how long it took) but I seriously didn’t expect to be so excited to get our wedding album, and I certainly didn’t realize I’d be so concerned about the digital photos!

Is there anything you became unexpectedly attached to during your wedding planning process?

*Part 1 of my album adventure describes our basic 4×6 book, which you can see here.