Newport Wedding Photographer Andrew Miller on...
"Wedding Album Design - Styles and Layouts"
This article is all about the main types of wedding albums out there and concentrates on the three main ones:
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Overlay Wedding Albums
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Digital Wedding Albums (Story Book Albums)
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Traditional Wedding Albums
Overlay Wedding Album Designs
An 'Overlay Wedding Album' is an album that uses traditional prints from your wedding and then overlays those prints with a matt, or border. The matt can be different colour's, but is usually white or black.
The matt itself can be different shapes and sizes and contain different apertures (spaces for your photos).
The cheaper ones are bought part assembled, whereby the photographer will attach the photos to each page and apply a mount to 'frame' the image. The most expensive are bespoke made, so you'll have a choice of cover materials, page colour's, edging colour's, etc. One of the most used overlay wedding albums are by Mario Acerboni, and an example of the type of overlays can be seen below:
Digital Wedding Album Designs
A digital wedding album is an album in which the images are digitally printed directly onto the pages of the album, giving an edge to edge look to the photographs. The digital album is also much easier to use if you want to be more creative and add 'fades' and 'merges' to images.
Both of the images above have a background photograph with one or more photographs laid on top. This allows you and the photographer to tell the story of the weeding and include as many elements as needed to convey what happened. Digital wedding albums give you and the photographer more creative passion to design your wedding album together. It is usual for you and the photographer to get together after you have chosen your images and design the layout of the album together. This means you get what you want - which is a special 'one in the world' wedding album.
As you can see with a digital album you can get the best of both worlds! The best maker for this type of album is Graphistudio, although there are a lot of newcomers to the market.
The great benefit of a digital album is that it can be reproduced should anything happen to your main album and also that the pages on a digital wedding album can be thicker, making it last longer and the final (and best for me!) is that you can touch the pages and not have to worry about getting fingerprints on the images!!!
The video below gives an implression of what can be done with a Graphistudio Wedding Album whilst clicking on this link will take you to a range of Graphistudio wedding albums
Traditional Wedding Album Designs
The traditional wedding album is one that you Mum and Dad and possibly even your Gran and Grandad would recognise today. It consists of individual pages that have one image placed onto them. It is sometimes possible to get two smaller images.
Each page in a traditional wedding album has an spacer page to help prevent the photograph sticking to the reverse of the previous page.
These albums usually come supplied with a presentation box to store the album.
Digital versions of Traditional wedding albums
Yes - you read that correctly! It is possible to create a digital version of a traditional look album. This gives you the benefit of an old fashioned look whilst retaining the best parts of the digital world.
Summary
In summary the type of album you would like should also dictate the photographer you should work with. Many photographers offer only one type of album and you should be aware that quality may suffer if they agree to produce an album that you want but they have not made before!
Andrew Miller Photography works with digital wedding albums and traditional wedding albums.
Is this a winner? Print it out, come along to one of the wedding fayres I am attending and find out!
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Andrew Miller Photography is based close to Newport but covers all of South Wales (Newport, Cwmbran, Pontypool, Cardiff, Barry, Swansea, Usk, Chepstow, Bristol, Taunton etc) and the Forest of Dean (Coleford, Cinderford, Clearwell) as well as covering wedding across the UK - Buckinghamshire, Yorkshire, Scotland, Merseyside and London.
