Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Elegant Bride

Alysia at her Bridal portrait session. Palm Valley Gardens in Ponte Vedra is such a beautiful venue that we did this pre wedding session there.

Alysia's ALice in Wonderland Wedding




A fantastic, happy celebration of Alysia and Ben's marriage.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Wedding Albums


Ever since I started my business I have always included an album in our collections. Occasionally we will produce the rare “shoot & burn” but I really try to shy away from them. (Shoot and Burns are when you only deliver the digital images on a disc – no prints or albums are provided) I believe an album should be provided with all collections because we are all losing a bit of our photographic legacy as images get achieved into the dark recesses of our hard drives. Having access to digital files is important. Sharing photos on facebook and your iPhone gives people a lot of pleasure and is a good thing.

But there also needs to be a hard copy that will survive the internet. There needs to be something that the bride and groom can touch and feel and show future generations. There needs to be something that will survive and create their personal legacy. I truly believe that people deserve good photographs and albums that their children and grandchildren will be able to appreciated.

My design philosophy is that you should always see the photos first and not the design work and that the photos should tell you a story about what happened that day.
In general I try to also keep a very clean and simple design. I do tend to have more photos in my albums than many other photographers.

I design all my albums in Photoshop freehand with no pre-designed templates. Every album is unique to the personalities of the bride and groom. My style has a documentary feel to it and I try to make it tell a story. When I start designing an album, I choose all the photos I want in the album. I then go through the photos and group them into the photos that will go on one page. Each page gets it’s own subfolder to put the images into.

When I get into grouping photos and designing an album, I am always thinking about what the main photo for the page will be. Every page needs to have an anchor photo – a photo that will stand out and make the page visually interesting. Often times that main photo will take up half or all of the page spread. After that, I look for images that support the main photo and tell a story.