JET Album Design Service

The goal with JET album design service is for our clients to have their bridal  albums within 90 days.  If you've asked around you'll find that the average wait time for a wedding album is around one year.    Of course,  you ask any photographer and they can assure you that you can have your wedding album right away.  Then again, what else are they going to tell you?    Would you really hire a photographer who takes over a year to give you a completed album?    Most photographers would like you to order your album long before your first anniversary, but unfortunately there is no plan to do this.   And despite their best intentions and your expectations the chances are fairly high that by the time you get your album, the excitement of your wedding will have long since passed.

Speaking of excitement, your wedding is very exciting when you first get engaged.  it's time to go dress shopping and picking out the bridal party and all the glamorous fun parts of the wedding seem to be some of the first things you work on.    Then after time it's too many meetings with vendors trying to find the right ones.  It's "negotiating" the wedding budget, and trying to figure out who you need to invite versus some of the people you want to invite.   As the wedding gets closer its seating charts, guest counts and keeping track of who gets what meal.    Yes, it gets more stressful as the wedding day approaches.   Even if you're the type of person who thrives on the details of planning a wedding, the amount of work can seem overwhelming.    Too many things go on the back burner in your life as you set aside more and more time to devote to planning your wedding.  When the wedding day has passed, you need to focus once again on the items that you put on the back burner in your life.  You also need to write and send out hand written thank you notes.   More or less the wedding has passed and you want to get back to your life.

When you start asking your friends why they don't have their wedding album,  the real story is that they need to select their images, but the reality is that looking through hundreds if not thousands of images to find the best 80 or so images to go into the album is about as much fun as figuring out the seating charts for the reception.   The average bride just says "I'll get around to this later" and often when the first anniversary rolls around  or they get pregnant the project suddenly seems important once again.   

 

How soon is now?

Your friends and family are excited to see your wedding images.  However, they are far less excited to see them one, two or three years after your wedding.  What we do is make certain you have something great to show in a period of time is close to your wedding because you will appreciate it.    Though these albums cannot be thrown together overnight, time is of the essence.

 

Efficient, not cookie cutter

Getting to the point in putting together a unique, compelling album quickly, without making it look cookie cutter is something that isn't easy.  However, we can show you around 50 different albums that you can hold in your hands that are each  unique and creative.   How do we do this?  How can we make something break taking, and unique as you without pushing junk out the door?

• There is a plan-    We have a plan, and when we meet we'll discuss the plan with you.  It's a plan that we gladly put up against other studios.  With the newbie's there is no plan what-so-ever.   With the more established studio the plan is  "Pick out your favorite images (12-36 months after your wedding) and we'll put an album together for you."    Though having a plan is better than no plan, we have a much better plan than what most studios offer.

 

• Efficiency-  You've been to a lot of wedding photography websites, how many of them talk about efficiency?   Sure, you'll see a lot of talk about style, and beliefs, and a lot of blog posts that say "The bride was so lovely, and the groom smiled all day long."   We talk about efficiency because it's a big part of what we're offering.    In 2008 we developed many new systems and efficiencies to handle a higher work load without being bogged down.   A lot of this is leveraging computer technology.   Honestly, there is nothing sexy about a five page data management plan.  It's not a good conversation topic at a party.  But recently we had a computer IT professional come to us, and he had an interest in what we were doing.  He then went out to interview other potential wedding photographers   He started asking them questions about data management and their eyes just glazed over.  They had no idea, more or less plan for backing up their data  This is why when people have computers stolen, or hard drives crashing they write into photography forums and legal advice as they mention that their last five weddings were lost.

 

• If it's trendy, it's not ours-  Oh, we just love fads.  There was something a few years back that was called a Lens Baby.  It was this lens that was made with flexible  PVC tubing.    The photographer could bend it and make some unique and highly distorted images.  It was cool the first time you saw it.  Then every wedding photography website had images made from this lens.   Then all at once everyone stopped using this accessory.     Purple skies are also cool the first time you see them in a wedding album.  Except, have you really ever seen a purple sky before?  Heavily cross processed images, and wild saturations are going to make your album look very old     One of the albums we'll gladly show you was done in 2003.   By today's standards its old.  The dress is dated.  However, the photos are wonderful and they need no special effects.  The album holds up.  Our belief  is that good photography will stand the test of time.

 

• Hard Work-   A 30 page wedding album takes us about twelve hours to design.   It used to take over 20.  If we didn't care very much we can do it in about 3 hours.   A large part of what we're working on these days is fixing people to make them look fantastic.  The quality of the gear we use, and the manner in which we shoot unfortunately exposes just about every flaw on a person's face.   People don't want to see close ups with crow's feet and broken pores.   Often the stress of the wedding day gives the bride a pimple, which can be hidden from the naked eye with makeup.  But, unfortunately, our lenses pick it up.  So, going back and working on people's faces in key shots in your album  is one thing we do to enhance our albums.  Our goal is to make certain that you don't notice that work has been done on your images in your album, we just want you to think "Damn, I look great!"

The benefit of a wedding album

Our wedding albums have been described as a "movie in an album."  Sure there will be tons of friends at your wedding, some with good cameras who are known for taking a nice picture or two.  It's not the same thing.  You can put the images on the screen saver on your computer, in frames, on your Facebook page, but then again, it's not the same thing.   You can even make a nice slideshow set to music of your wedding images, and though it's nice, it's not the same thing.

Weddings have evolved since your parents wedding day.  Just ask them.   There were no colorful tablecloths, mood lights, favors, or elaborate center pieces.  You may spend more on your shoes than your mom spent on her entire dress.   Things were different.  Today weddings have themes, or at the very least some  elaborate concepts.  People want to see your ideas, who showed up, what happened, how all the pieces came together.   People don't care to go to a website, or see a slide show.  When you pull out one of our albums, you can tell your story. Instead of a ton of predictable images shoved into an album, we'll give you well thought out layouts laid out to show off your wedding day in the best light.  We include key members of your family so that you can talk about them, along with showing off how wonderful you looked on your wedding day, and how much fun everybody had. 

There are three things that are important for a good album layout, the first of course is the photography.  If it's not great the album won't be great.  The second is the selection of images.  Images tell the story, and too many images tell no story.  A few good images on a page layout can go further than 20 average images.   The third is the presentation   Though you think you want  to remember everything that happened on your wedding day, in reality you want to remember the good stuff.  You'll want to edit out the slow times and make your day appear that it was jumping and bumping the whole day long.   Good images, in a smart presentation helps you look like you had a fabulous wedding, and that's what you want to remember. 

We've had clients sign up with us because they went to a friends wedding and saw it go down first hand. Then they saw the resulting album and they comment to us that the wedding didn't come off as good or look as good as the way it was presented.   I say "Shh, don't let them know that!"