Weddingbee Blog

Our album and wedding video are in and they are AMAZING!!!

Part of our wedding package included an album for us and one for each set of parents. After seeing the pictures on our online gallery, I knew we would end up adding a couple of additional pages to our album. Our fabulous photographer Lynn mentioned that our wedding, with all of its details, would look pretty awesome in a unique 20 x 8 flipbook style and after seeing a couple of layouts we agreed and upgraded.

We debated between green and brown for the cover, even put it to a vote on Lynn’s blog. As you can see green won out (which is what we were leaning towards from the beginning).
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Okay, I know you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to leave this place, but there is just one more wedding related item I want to share with you! Just one… I promise! When planning our wedding, Mr. Turtle and I wanted everything to look classy and elegant, but we really didn’t want any of the elements to seem extravagant or showy. I felt like we accomplished this pretty well with our wedding itself, but one over-the-top item we just couldn’t pass up was a quality album from our photographer. Mike Larson, Inc. works with KISS Wedding Books for their albums. In my opinion, KISS books manage to achieve the perfect balance between luxury and simplicity. Rather than gushing about the lusciousness of the 12″x12″ leather cover, the adorable cloth dust-cover it comes in, and the vibrancy of the images on Fuji Crystal Archival paper, I’ll let our album speak for itself:

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So, I promised myself I would post every day this week because I didn’t post at all last week. However, I have a TON of homework to do (it’s my last week of class!) so I don’t have a lot of time. I have lots of things I want to write about, but I want to REALLY write. You know, articulate my thoughts clearly and re-read my post before I hit the publish button. Luckily, my photographer sent us our engagement picture book which we’ll be using as our guestbook and it arrived today. So, I present blogging without writing—aka pictures of our guestbook:

Ooooh, what’s in this fancy box? Oh, and Cannon, I love your lime green gingham table cloth! *blushing* Thanks! (Ok, I’m done complimenting myself.)
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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.
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Hi Hive! You don’t mind if I do drive-bys every now and again, right? Promise I’ll drop by when I think I’ve got something good for ya. Today I’m thinking about wedding photography… six months after the wedding.

Photography quickly rose to the top of my list of important things when we began planning. I knew I wanted something special, but I didn’t know exactly what. Unless you are used to working with photographers on a pretty regular basis, most of us just know what we like when we see it. When I stumbled upon Luke’s work, I just knew he was the one. It was sort of like falling in love at first sight.

Then you find the price for your dream. And it’s usually higher than you hoped for.

To fit the constraints of budget, the only way to make my make my 2-shooter, 8-hour fantasy happen was to cut out the album option. My high-quality images would land in my lap on 2 discs, about 8GB worth of our gorgeous day. Luke also included web-ready images, which were much smaller and included his watermark. This made recapping our wedding pretty easy breezy, but now it’s all up to me to figure out how to present my photos outside of the internet.

Uploading the high-res images to photobook sites became frustrating when I learned that most hosts don’t allow images over 10 MB—almost all of my images are over 20 MB. Read more…

Hello, Hive! It’s Mrs. Oyster here, the one who got married a looong time ago. I’m back… almost.

While waiting for our digital photos, I’ve been starting out in our quest to DO SOMETHING with these hundreds of wedding prints. The first step was deciding to put the proof images in something other than a shoebox. (If you haven’t booked your photographer yet, proof sets are just prints of every photo from the wedding.) Our photographers offered the proofs in two formats: a pre-printed book and the loose 4×6 prints. Personally, I prefer the prints, because I love that we can take them out and frame them if we want. Later, I overheard one of them talking, and she said that customers who order loose prints often complain because they are unwieldy, and because family members and friends will come over and steal one or two of them.

Well, we had no such problems, mostly because we never told anyone that we had any prints, and because our house is too messy to invite anyone over to. Also, the photographers made it very easy for our geographically spread-out family to buy their own prints online, so that worked out well. And in the beginning at least, I love that we have them to pick up and look at when it’s time to do things like choose album shots, select photos for enlargements, or whatever else (like writing Weddingbee recaps!).

But eventually, I needed to put the prints in a format that made it easier to look them over. Read more…

One of the things that was super important to us when choosing a photographer was finding someone who included an album in the package. I can be pretty cheap and figured I may not want to spend the money months after the wedding, so I knew I had to include the price up front. I’m really happy I did because if you read this post, you may know that I probably would have cheaped out on it.

We went to pick it up the other night. Here is a peek into the pages of the Starfish wedding album:
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