Best Handmade Albums | Charleston Wedding Photographer
Posted on April 19, 2012
After spending many months researching album options, I have chosen a wonderful vendor to create heirloom photo albums of your weddings and portrait sessions. Red Tree Albums is based in Kentucky, and they have all the photos printed at one of my favorite labs, ProDPI. The print quality is unsurpassed, and the quality of these handmade albums is top-notch. Best of all, the cover choices are beautiful — luxurious leathers, sumptuous silks, lovely linens. (Trust me, I’ve seen some albums where the options were too reminiscent of 80s wallpaper to stand the test of time.)
After I design your album and upload the approved layout, ProDPI creates full spread prints, in this case, 12×24 inches. The lab ships the images to Red Tree, where they mount and trim the prints, bind the pages and create the covers. Enhancements include debossed names on the leather and suede covers and cameo cutouts (a favorite image in a window) on the fabric albums. The pages are seamless, so there is no gutter to interrupt the wow factor of your storybook. Check out Red Tree’s blog for other gorgeous examples of ways to customize your wedding story with cover choices, cameos and various fonts of debossing.
I created my sample album as a 12×12 book. This one has 24 spreads since I shot a poolside barbeque and the rehearsal dinner before the wedding. Options for parent albums include custom books in smaller sizes or their mini albums. At 5×5 inches, the well-priced minis are the perfect brag book for toting everywhere and sharing. Same fantastic quality in a smaller package.
Even though my wedding photography packages include the disc of hundreds of full-resolution images (which I encourage you to print and display), I truly believe everyone should invest in an album so you can appreciate your photos and share the story in a more personal way than on a monitor or smart phone. You’ll enjoy it now, and your children will love it later! If it is not in the budget during wedding planning, take a tip from my savvy brides and plan on my creating one as a wonderful first anniversary gift.
Like your grandmother’s monogrammed silver, your wedding album will become a family heirloom.
Pictured here are the 5×5 mini album and a 12×12 book with 24 spreads.
Contact Jen to discuss your wedding photography needs and check out these beautiful albums.
Tags: heirloom photography, portrait album, ProDPI, Red Tree Albums, wedding album
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7 Comments so far
Oh thanks, Christine! The desk came from my parents’ basement, where we recently cleared out decades of … treasures. The school desk came from a school in my mom’s tiny Georgia hometown.
Those albums are, of course, stunning, as is the photography. But where’d you score that awesome DESK?!
Thanks, Tamara! That’s my Cidney running by — I thought she was going to be an album holder/photo assistant, but she much preferred skipping around the backyard while I snapped
Jen ~ lovely! Great photography too. Love the young girl running pass the old schooldesk!
Thanks so much! I’m really pleased with the quality, in case you can’t tell
Really great books, very elegant.
These look gorgeous!!