Fridays with the Photographer | Wedding Album Truths

The real value of your wedding album: It’s not just about you!

Let me start with a story. The other day, I was sitting at lunch with a very close friend of mine who just happens to be about twenty years older than me. I commented on a piece of beautiful china that she had on display and she told me the story of where it came from–it was an heirloom piece gifted to her from her ex-husband’s grandmother. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we were sitting around the table, paging through her perfect 1980’s wedding album. Every page that she turned held a memory for her and she was sharing stories from her day and other stories from her life that she was reminded of. We sat for a good 45 minutes with her album, a cozy space heater, and chai tea lattes. It was a perfect winter afternoon.

If she were given a USB of her wedding (let’s pretend that was an option in 1983), I honestly don’t believe that she would have gone digging into the closet for her wedding USB drive, ran upstairs for her laptop, booted the laptop up, and scrolled through the several hundred images or so with me. I probably would have skimmed through her pictures on facebook one evening before bed, liked a few, and moved on. We wouldn’t have shared that afternoon of stories and memories together, looking through her album. I started thinking about my own memories and the opportunities that I’d like to be able to share with my theoretical kids or nieces or younger friends.

My Wedding Album Story

As a child, my little sister and I would dig out my parent’s wedding album when no one was looking. It was in a cabinet that was child-proofed by a tightly wound rubber band around the handles. A.K.A. It was very poorly child-proofed. The albums were kept “locked up” because they were valuable and our grimy, little kid hands were potentially going to damage the beautiful photos. But we loved to see my mom in her puffy-sleeved gown, my dad with serious sideburns, and my aunt and uncle in a dress and suit (wait! did that really happen)? Not to mention, the cutest little demon child eating nothing but pickles and cheese and biting people who tried to hold her. (In case you didn’t realize it, that was me!) If these memories were sitting on a USB in a box in the cabinet, odds are that we would not have plugged it into the computer and had the same experience with these photographs. Or, if we were incredibly unlucky, we might have accidentally deleted the files or dropped and damaged the hard drive. So much for the memories!

I have to be honest with you. I didn’t purchase a wedding album from my photographer. I really did want one on a certain level, but her pricing was incredibly confusing and it seemed so expensive. To make things worse, she didn’t have a single sample for me to see, so I didn’t have any understanding as to why I should add an extra two thousand dollars to what I was already spending. I thought that I would just order prints with my digital files. I figured at some point I might make a coffee table book with my wedding photos, just like I did with my engagement photos. At the time, I was not yet a professional photographer, so I didn’t have access to the resources and album companies that I have now. I just ordered my books from MPix.

Shortly after we were married, we began to settle in to our first house together, my husband left his job to pursue a new career in medicine, and I picked up a second job and started my photography business. Life started to happen. We got busy. Needless to say, I didn’t have the time to design my perfect wedding album, even though I had more access and knowledge that I had in the beginning. Time has gone by and I still don’t have an album.

Why do I tell you all of this before I share the fact that you should consider the value of a wedding album? Because if I had an album spread for every couple who said that they would build their own coffee table book/wall art/scrapbook/etc from their digital files (but never did), then I would already have a wedding album.

My husband and I will be celebrating our 5th anniversary this year. Since we’ve been married, we’ve moved four times, I’ve opened a studio in downtown Philadelphia, my husband is preparing for his residency, and Ashley Gerrity Photography has become more than I ever expected it would be. We are still busy, but I’ve decided that this is the year when I’ll prioritize my own album. Times are changing, my best friends and sister are all ready grow their family, and I want to make sure that the little people in my life have some fantastic photos to put their grimy little fingers all over when they come to visit me. And I will be standing by, waiting, with plenty of memories to pass on to them.

Do you have memories of paging through old family photographs or albums?  Have you chosen to include an album in your wedding collection?  Feel free to leave your thoughts and advice on wedding albums in the comments!

xo Ashley