How We Build Art Focused Story Telling Albums

 
Our process assures that your wedding album tells the story of your wedding day. We start planning your album as soon as we meet you! We shoot your wedding to provide the images you need to tell your story!
 
We build albums as 2-page spreads. Each spread is a chapter in your wedding story. This is a collaborative effort between you and us. We want you to name the chapters and then work with us pick the images that tell the story of that chapter! Storytelling usually involves picking the images that contain the highest emotional content to you. You need to help us identify those emotional images.
 
This process is very different from simply picking the images that are artistically best!
 
Today the average wedding album has 2.1 images per spread. The albums are often filled with nearly perfect looking images. To get large numbers of near perfect images the photographer needs to tightly orchestrate the wedding day. “Please dress over here in front of this beautiful light…” “Bride, stand there, don’t move … Dad, can you now come in the room and put the necklace on your daughter … Dad, please do it again … look into each other’s eyes” Taken to the extreme, this type of wedding photography is called “illustrative” … posed to look candid. The photographer shoots mainly the “key moments.” The results can be stunningly beautiful! But is the emotion & story captured natural or contrived?
 
Our process is different. We want an average of 5 (2-7 range) images per spread to assure you have sufficient images to tell the chapter’s story. We allow the wedding to naturally flow! We move us, not you! For most of the day we have 2 photographers capturing images from 2 different angles!
 
We photograph more than the “key moments.” We spend the entire day looking through the camera waiting for the “little moments.” … Glances, Smiles, Tears … and … gestures of Love, Contentment, Joy, and Celebration … We believe the real story is best preserved by being patient and unobtrusive.
 
Our Goal is to make it difficult for you to choose just a few chapters and images for your album! Your challenge is to resist the temptation to choose huge numbers of beautiful images and the desire for multi-volume album telling the details of your beautiful story … Who do you hope wins?
 
Read our article about “What is Art Focused StoryTelling” to learn about how we remove distractions, enhance emotions and weave images into stories!
 

What is Art Focused Storytelling?

Capturing the Emotion of the Moment
Artfully Enhancing Each Image
Creatively Weaving the Images to Tell Your Story

Why are the images so emotionally appealing?

Capturing the Emotion of the Moment: Storytelling photography starts with capturing the emotion at the “perfect moment.” Just before or just after is not perfect. Skilled storytelling photographers watch the story unfolding before them and anticipate when the emotion will peak (Bride raises head & smiles at groom as he places her ring on her finger – Capture the moment their eyes “lock!” – It all happens in an instant and is gone forever if not captured!). The anticipation is similar to baseball batter “reading the pitch.” A great batter “sees” more messages and can better anticipate where the ball will be. People “telegraph” changes in expression! The skilled photographic storyteller reads these messages in order to capture the images at the perfect moment.  A photographer attains those skills by observing people for thousands of hours with their eye to the camera and pressing the shutter to take hundreds of thousands of images.
 
Artfully Enhancing Each Image: Like Master Painters, photographers can enhance the emotion conveyed to the viewer in an image by hiding elements that are distracting and accentuating elements that are the center of attention and full of emotion.  In the studio the photographer has control of background, lighting and directs the posing of the subjects.  Subject’s faces are usually bright to attract the viewer’s attention while light to their hands and feet is blocked to keep attention away.  However, while capturing the spontaneous emotions of a wedding, the photographer has far less control over the environment as the image is captured.  But the photographer has tools to assist with post production of the image.  A red “exit sign” does not enhance the emotion of a “first dance” image.  It can be removed. Likewise, adding some blurring, changing to B&W, or in other ways modifying the color palette in the image can make the emotion more expressive!  The way “Master Painters” loaded different colors on their paint brushes creates a color contrast that makes the colors vivid and the image “real.”  Photographers can similarly modify the color contrast to direct the viewers’ attention and raise the interest and emotion of the viewer.
 
Creatively Weaving the Images to Tell Your Story: The placement and relative size of images can also unite and delineate the story of the combined images.  We have many products that allow images to be combined into more complete stories.  These include Albums (2-page spreads are chapters & all the chapters tell the complete story), Wall Art products include: Collections (multiple independent images placed near each other with intent), Collages (multiple independent images on one print) and Composites (Multiple images smoothly integrated into a story).
 
The father & daughter dance is often filled with various emotions.  One image cannot convey that complete story.  But multiple images are necessary to capture the complete story.  When developing a multiple image story, the image with the strongest emotion is often called the “anchor image.”  By making this image larger and slightly brighter the viewers’ attention can be intentionally drawn to that image.  The other images show other emotions, but they are more supportive.  They “develop and support the main plot” in the photographic story.
 
As Art Focused Storytellers we have developed a very intentional and methodical style of Wedding Photography.   It starts with the skill of photojournalism to capture the emotion of the moment, adds the skills of an artist to fully develop the emotions of the image, and ends with the storytelling skills of a graphic artist.
 
Our goal is to make you “delighted” with the quality of our products and services!  Just “satisfied” is not good enough!  We are committed to you!