I got a bunch of different sizes so you can really tell the big differences between them because often what we think something will be like is far from what it is. The first four are all hinged albums. The biggest difference between hinged and flush is that the flush pages are printed on a thick photo paper but them mounted to a board which gives it a very small gutter (center of the book). You can still have photos span across the spread on a hinged book but the gutter is a tiny bit larger which you should be able to see from the photos. The hinged books are not mounted to a board, but printed on pretty thick paper and they lay pretty nice unlike a “magazine style” where the pages are stuffed into the center of the book and you lose a lot of your image.

Hinged books are great for parent wedding albums, portrait/seniors, families, children and if your on a budget and can’t make a flush mount work, your own wedding album as well. However, I’ll always make a case for a flush mount when it comes to your wedding album, but I’ll get to that at the end. :)

We do offer leather and fabric options for covers on the hinged books but my favorite are the photo covers and print covers.

This first set of images is just to show you the difference in size between them all. The orange book is a 10×10, the blue swirl book is an 8×8, the small rectangle one is a 5×7 and the front square is a 5×5.

This little 5×7 album really surprised me. In my mind a 5×7 seems awfully small but this is a wonderful little size. The photos are certainly big enough and for this type of a session, it’s just perfect. This is a “dirt don’t hurt” session which is our take on a “trash the dress” session. It’s just fun and whimsical so a small book like this is just perfect. The cover is also my favorite of all of them. I just can’t get enough of the color! 

This is the 8×8 which also surprised me which was a great size it was. This is perfect for an engagement book or a guest book. In this sample, it’s an engagement book. They are having a peacock themed wedding so this solid printed cover was the perfect choice. It’s simple but still makes a statement because of the bold print. The photo below it illustrates the hinge in the book the best.

This is a 10×10 wedding album. The printed covers are so great when you have a good “brand” to your wedding. Just by looking at the cover, you have probably developed ideas about who these people are and I love that. 

…and this little guy is a 5×5 album of Owen! When I knew I wanted to get a 5×5 sample I knew right away it would be of him since he is also tiny. I like this because it’s nice and small and cute and if you did photos every year of your child, it would be adorable to have a little 5×5 collection of their first years. 

Ok This is the big daddy of all the albums! The flush mount. I completely understand that wedding albums can be expensive and if your purchasing it a la carte or after the fact you may not be understanding it’s worth. When your hire a photographer, your trusting in their creative skill, their professionalism, their ability to have a vision for your day and carry that out. Your looking for images that tell the story of your day so you can always remember it in the best light. So why wouldn’t you put a top of the line album in your budget? It is the final piece to the vision and is what will stay in your family forever. This is the one physical item that holds the memories of your wedding and what will be passed down to your kids.

20 years from now, dvd’s may break or get lost or they might not even be the standard of what we use. Do you remember zip drives? Those used to be a big deal too haha. A wedding album isn’t something you will lose, isn’t something that will go out of style. It’s timeless. Everything has gone so digital that important things are getting lost and looked over. Valuable things like wedding albums. Yes, technology is awesome and I’m certainly a fan, but I believe that some things must remain sacred and a great wedding album is one of them.

Some of you may say, “I get it Holly, but I really can’t afford it” and I understand that but do challenge you to look at other things your spending your money on with your wedding if your on a budget. Weight their value. Even if you simply cannot pre-purchase an album, I will always still be an advocate hiring a great photographer and then saving up for the album later if you simply can’t swing it before. Logically, there is just one day, one chance, to get amazing photos. You have all the time you need to save up for an album. There is no point to hiring a super cheap photographer who doesn’t do work you love just because their “package” includes and album and fits within your current budget. Whats the point of having that album forever if it’s full of photos you don’t love? If you have no other options financially, hire the photographer you love, get photos you’ll love forever and make it a part of your monthly budget to save a certain amount towards and amazing album afterwards.

Ok so with all that said…here is a 10×10 flush mount with a polished crocodile bone leather cover. This book also comes in a really nice leather box as well. I didn’t take photos of it, but the hinged books come in a hard dark brown box.

Since many of our clients are not local, I hope this helps to get an idea of what our albums are like. If you have any questions at all please let me know!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If you are not a wedding client of ours or already married but never got an album, I do album design work for anyone and everyone because I’m such a firm believer in the fact that it’s never too late to get one made!

Here are some samples of my design work:

www.gauperphoto.com/fiddleralbum

www.gauperphoto.com/miller

www.gauperphoto.com/hoekstra_album

If your interested, please email me for pricing. Holly@GAUPERphoto.com

After you break that certain level or amount of stress and exhaustion, having clients like this really just picks you up and restores your faith in humanity sometimes. :)

I am working on the album right now and hope to get a full blog post up about their wedding very soon. These two certainly have the love and I can’t wait to tell you more about their wedding!

But for now, some SWEET detail shots from the ever talented Ryan and a cute bride and groom page I’m in love with. These bride and groom photos were taken right after their first look before the ceremony. She seemed so nervous and anxious for when they did their first look. She was just beaming and it was adorable.

I’ve also turned sam into an Etsy addict! :) She bought some amazingly cute headbands for the shoot and I think is planning a sort of peacock themed wedding. I literally squealed hearing her ideas and seeing a picture of her dress. I think it will rival hopes dress even!

They bought an engagement book and guest book to go along with their photos so I thought this would be the best way to show off all their best pictures. :) I haven’t designed the guest book yet, but that will come soon.

We also tried our hand at video. We have not had time to put it together yet since we are still crazy busy but I’m really excited for it. It seriously makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside watching them talk about each other. It’s great to shoot couples who really have the love and they are just super cute together. I’m basically extremely excited to trek to Iowa for their wedding day. :) Seriously people….the LOVE!!! look at it! :)

Bottom left photo is one of the etsy headbands! The fabric roses were so amazing. I learned how to make them a few months back but mine are not as awesome as these at all, haha

Thanks for sticking it through the day with us guys, it was a long shoot but I think very worth it! Soooo Soo Excited for your wedding!!

NOTE: These are the images for the album design, so the middle is the cut of the spread which is why some of the white lines don’t match up. I’m not lazy or overlooking it, it’s just because the cut. Don’t judge. :)

]]> http://www.mudeyes.com/derek-sam-peacock-themed-colors-and-fall-goodness-kalamazoo-engagement-photographer/feed/ 6 http://www.mudeyes.com/drooling-over-vintage-tool/ http://www.mudeyes.com/drooling-over-vintage-tool/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:49:25 +0000 Holly http://www.mudeyes.com/?p=1930 post by: holly

I think beth is awesome. I have loved working with her so much. Her wedding day was amazing and she didn’t change hardly anything in my album design (which I really quite enjoy. haha) and she has been awesome through everything. We shot her wedding in May and just got her album in!

I am madly in love with the leather she picked. Wow…black vintage tool you have stolen my heart! Ahh! I loved the sample but my gosh, it’s so much more awesome in person. It even feels awesome.

There were so many awesome pictures from her wedding, I maxed out the pages the printer allows a book to have so this thing weighs a bazillion pounds. We didn’t do albums in any of our packages last year and almost all of our couples this year get albums so things have changed a lot.

I really love being able to design albums that follow the day instead of just letting people do it themselves and (heaven forbid) just put 4×6′s in a traditional album. Each photo doesn’t stand on it’s own like that, they are part of a story and It makes me feel like I’ve really completed something when I can hand off a beefy album like this. :)

If you want to see the inside pages, you can view all of them here: http://www.thegaupers.com/maes

[Our blog is linked to facebook. If you are viewing this there, go to www.theGAUPERS.com to view the images larger since facebook makes everything sooo tiny. Thanks!]

{note about first page above: In my moments of exhaustion, Ryan always stops by my office to see how I'm doing and has such a fresh take on things and great ideas! I wanted to do something cool for the first page but was so creatively drained since it was the last page I did. Tiny Mosiac he says.... and... it...was...perfect. I love it.
...and yes, I realize there are duplicates of some of them. It was like 7am, they are so tiny and I was exhausted...It is like where's waldo... so it's fun. :)}

A couple months ago I decided to go through all of our 2009 seniors, pick out my favorite images and design an album of it. I thought it would be something great to do every year to see how much we have grown, how our style changes and just to have memories really. The whole thing took me one day and I super happy with how it turned out.

We are offering albums as part of our packages this year so we have some people who want to actually see the flush mount album and we have no sample of that, so we had to get one made up. Since its the end of the year and all, I thought a 2009 wedding favorites album would be perfect!

I honestly don't remember much of the work we did in 2008 because it feels like it was 10 years ago. So much has happened and our life is so busy that my my memory just gets full and has to push some things to the side to fit more in sometimes. Thus, a favorites album every year for weddings and seniors (our specialities) was just the best idea ever.

Excellent! I'm so excited about this! ...I thought to myself.
Let's get started.

I'm terrible at being harsh with our photos and only picking the best because I like so many of them, so I had Ryan do the first run through. Then, I went through them all seeing what he had picked and picked the ones I thought he missed, ect.

Then we had 1,200.
Oh geez.
You can't fit 1,200 photos in an album.

So I went to Ryan again begging for him to help me narrow them down more which, by the way, is so difficult!
We were able to bring it down to about 300. So I started designing the album around my very favorite ones. When designing these pages though, to make the spread cohesive, it does involve some photos that, on their own, are not our most favorite images. So I had to go back and search for ones to make the spreads complete.

My goal was to get our favorites from every part of the day. Getting Ready, Bridesmaids, Groosmsmen, Ceremony, Kids, Bride and Groom, Wedding Party and Reception. I had a page of family in there but that got cut due to the number of pages. Trying to get each part of the day proved to make it even more difficult because I had to stay within 36 spreads. If I would have done a 2009 bride and groom favorites album, this would have been much easier. A regular wedding album of just one wedding would be a breeze compared to this as well.

So, I ended up with about 14 spreads over the limit (HOW that happened I'm not sure, I must have been in the zone) I was working on this album from the hours of 11pm - 6am for like 4 or 5 days. So having to cut so many pages I worked so hard on was kind of painful but I am still happy with how everything turned out.

What we ended up with: 36 spreads that contain 195 images (not including the first page that has like 300 on it).

We also got a lime green leather cover for it!

Moral of the story: narrowing down 25,000 images to under 200 to fit in 36 spreads is way hard...but certainly worth the work. Is it all of our "best of" images? I'm not really sure because so many things had to be cut and it just became so hard to pick after seeing so many, but we certainly like the ones we picked from each category so we are happy.

At the end of the day, all I ever want is to be happy with the work I have done so I view this past week of working stupidly hard on this to be a success because I think this album is gonna look awesome when its printed.

Things during this process changed for me when I realized that although this is to show our clients what a flush mount book looks like, this is still OUR album (I am going to do a sample book of one whole wedding soon as a sample for brides anyways). These are images that we really enjoy from weddings that fit our style really well. The album does favor 2 weddings, Doug and Gillian Niffinegger and Ryan and Stephanie Hupfer. I would have liked to put more from other weddings but there just were not enough pages and when it came down to it, those were our favorite weddings of the year because they fit our style so well with the very fun vibe and all the bright colors. I think John Paul and Ashley Prebish are in here more a lot as well because that wedding was a bit more traditional but we still love those images so much and it doesn't always have to be all crazy, we love variety. :) I think we would need to do at least a 3 volume series to get all the images I would like...but thats not going to happen, we would go broke. :)

Whew! So that is the story of my week. I put the order in yesterday and they have super fast turn around time so I am hoping to have the book next week.

But for now, here are all the pages!

Last but not least, us! I felt like ending with the goof booth felt right but we had this back half-spread page left so I thought it would be cool to put photos of us at the end of the book every year. That way we can see how we change as the years go on as well as our work. 

Now that I am at the end of this very long post, I thought it might be fun to post the spreads that got cut. I am not sure if I made the right decision in cutting some of them, but I was kind of forced into it. I picked the ones that are in the album as "I can't print this without these" and the rest got cut. So I did not really want to get rid of any of them...but since this post is so long, I'll save the reject spreads for a later post. :)

Thank you to all of our couples this year, we learned so much and had a ton of fun. I am really proud of the work we did this year, even if it didn't make the book. Having a full year of 26 weddings really helped us financially to grow our business as much as we have. We may not have any money for ourselves left over, but we have been so lucky and so blessed to be able to buy all the equipment we need to continue and be even better this year!

The End.

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