Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Perfect Photos For The Perfect Album

While planning our wedding, it was very important to me that we'd come out of it with a professional-quality photo album to share with family and friends for the rest of our lives.

Well, we received ours this month, and it’s incredible! Our photographer Alex did a stellar job designing a beautiful layout from the photos we chose. The gorgeous album, which I’ll share with you very soon, is a black leather flush-mount style, beautiful to view and guaranteed to preserve our favorite shots permanently.

The only major challenge? Narrowing down the over 700 album shots Alex gave us to review to just 100 for inclusion in the album, which is actually one of the largest available. Being the perfectionist that I am, I definitely had a hard time. For example, after a lot of mental wrangling, I chose to include this photo.


It’s certainly a fun and beautiful shot, and I just love the way it showcases all of our bouquets. In fact, that's why I chose it, especially since we also included a humorous shot of the guys holding the flowers. But looking back, out of the hundreds and hundreds of entirely amazing photos we have from our day, there were other very creative shots I could easily have been chosen instead.

For example, what about this one?


Or this one?



Or even this one?



See the dilemma? I guess that when you honestly love your photos, it just becomes that much harder to narrow down the options!

LESSON LEARNED: When choosing photos for your professional album, try to remember that you are only choosing the best of the best of the best! Is there a photo you think is great but not necessary the cream-of-the-crop? Print it out for yourself or include it in a self-made album, whether from a site like Shutterfly or crafted on your own at home. An expensive, professional album should be the ultimate showcase for only those very few photos that are truly the most stunning and impressive from the entire day. And while it's important to choose enough of a variety to tell the whole story, it's definitely not necessary to try to squeeze in every last photo that you like.

Are you having a professional album made? How did you confront the challenge of deciding what to include and what to cut?

(Photo Credits: Alex Neumann Photography)

10 comments:

  1. I did not have a professional album made...I did it myself :) But totally understand about the dilemma , I still had a difficult time.

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  2. We didn't have a professional album made b/c it was too expensive and even our photographers said we could probably do something just as nice on our own for much less. I love our Shutterfly album and the fact that I was able to pick all the pictures and layouts and make it exactly how I wanted. I honestly don't think I could have picked just 100, talk about tough!!

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  3. No professional album for us, either! I read a great post on weddingbee about DIY albums and I think I'll go that route. It was hard narrowing down our e-pics for the iphoto books we made for ourselves and our parents, so I know it's going to be next to impossible to pick out 100 wedding photos!

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  4. We'll have a pro album since it's built into our photo package. Hopefully we don't run into the same problem we're having with our e-photos. We love them all so much that we can decide on favorites, so therefore we don't have a single print and it's been over 2 months!

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  5. We don't have a pro album in our contract with our photographer but I think we might still get one after the wedding. I really like my photographer's albums and it'll be nice to have someone take care of that for us. I'll create the albums for our family though. I bet choosing the pictures will be a challenge for us. Hopefully we have plenty of amazing pics to choose from!

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  6. I would have gone crazy picking photos if ours were as fantastic as yours. And I still can't get over your flowers. They were PERFECT.

    That first shot is my fave though!

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  7. I don't know how you managed to narrow your fabulous photos down to only 100! I know we're going to have a tough time!

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  8. Beautiful pictures! I don't think you could have gone wrong with any of them! So exciting to have the book in your hands, I'm sure!!

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  9. We are not planning to do a professional album. Most likely a diy one for us. I can certainly understand the difficulty in making the choices though.
    Your photos all look great. I can see why you had a difficult time. Love the one you did choose.

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  10. It took me FOREVER to decide too; we ended up going to the photographers studio to see the changes I was thinking of doing properly which totally helped.

    There were def some of my fav shots we couldnt fit in as they just didnt fit with the flow of the album which when we got I totally loved!!!

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