6 Great Reasons Why Wedding Albums are Important to Have

6 Great Reasons Why Wedding Albums are so Important to Have

Weddings can be quite, how can I say…involved these days. The wedding dress, the shoes, the venue, the car, the bomboniares, the flowers, the makeup, the hair, the invitations the skywriter that carves your name out in the sky…you name it, everything requires MONEY.

These days, with wedding photography so easily accessible on your mobile phone, new age couples are asking themselves why do I need a wedding album? Only old people have wedding albums and I’m not my grandmother…

Unfortunately,  I hear a lot of couples these days say “We don’t need a wedding album, we just want my photos on a USB.” Often it’s the first thing that people cut from their budget because they aren’t aware of the importance of a great quality wedding album. They think it’s old fashioned and no one ever looks at it.

Instead, money goes into things that you can’t take away with you after the wedding…such as bomboniares that everyone throws out anyway and goes straight into landfill. Nothing worse than that!

There are many ways to cut back on a wedding to save money, ( I can think of about 29)  but not investing into a  wedding album for me personally isn’t one of them.

Everything else is just a distant memory and trivial things that you stressed about just don’t really matter after the wedding day. What matters is your memories and how you choose to preserve them.

If you are thinking about whether you should have a wedding album or not, here are 6 great reasons why

1. Preserving Memories

Although it’s hard to imagine that you would forget any moment from your wedding day, the fact is that memories do fade over time. According to scientific research, you will lose up to 30% of your memory by the time you reach age 60. It will decline even faster if you drink and smoke too much!

I don’t even remember the slow dance I spent 10 weeks of my life learning to impress my guests at my wedding, let alone what my wife’s wedding dress looked like (i’m sure it was amazing!)

With the help of your wedding album, you will  instantly be reminded of all those special moments that made your wedding day. The relative that flew on a plane for 2 days just to see you walk down the aisle, the grandmother that gave you the biggest hug, your little niece who dropped flowers in front of you as you walked down the aisle. All those little things you adored about your wedding day.

Best of all, you will be able to look through your wedding album anytime  you wish, especially during anniversaries and when family and friends come visit. It may also be handy when times are tough, and you want to remember the time you and your partner were the happiest. I’ve head stories where it has saved marriages too!

Taking out an album is much easier than having to search for digital files. Just look at how some people organise their computer desktops and imagine how anyone could find anything!

As much as everyone trusts in electronic media to store important files, it’s imperative to remember that your electronic data can get lost, corrupted or deleted by accident (yep I’ve heard a lot of these stories).

If you’re ever in the unfortunate situation when there is a bushfire that is coming to your house and you are faced with the situation where you have to pack everything and go, the first thing that people normally grab are

1. Their wedding album

2. Their phone and the charger

3. Clothes and shoes

4. Laptop

5. Passports and important documents

6. And of course the car to drive away with

Everything else is left to burn. Even the Dyson and the Thermomix 🙁

So to most people it’s a treasured part of their lives and we can never underestimate how important it can be in the future when you least expect it

2. Wedding Albums are Like a Storybook

A good photographer will be able to curate a story from your wedding photos so that every page tells a story. A wedding album can be arranged to provide a complete view of their special day from beginning to end, giving it a cohesive storybook like feeling, not just a random scattering of photos that doesn’t really make sense.

All of my albums that I offer are completely lay flat without any seams through the middle so you’re able to maximise the viewing area of each page, giving you a flexibility in design to make photos spread right across the spread.

If your album is designed properly it will allow the photos to speak for itself, giving it room to breathe and be appreciated. Less is more in this case!

When looking through the pages of a wedding album, the couple’s friends, parents, children and grandchildren can enjoy the story of their wedding day for many years to come. You can also make additional copies of your album and send it to those who were not able to make it.

There’s just that special something that when photos are printed on paper, it just looks and feels better. It’s tactile, real and tangible and it makes your brain react differently when you view is as opposed to looking at it on a screen.

Which leads me to the next point

3. It triggers a greater emotional response than digital

There has been countless studies that show that viewing your photos in print form draws a far higher emotional response than viewed digitally. One study from Temple University in the USA had people view photographs via either digital or physical media. They used a variety of neuromarketing methods, including eye tracking and biometric measurements and MRI scans, to gauge the initial and subsequent reactions over a week.

They discovered that looking at a physical photo fires up 50x more parts of the brain (for you geeks out there, a greater activation of the ventral striatum) and triggered more of a emotional response and engages people for 10 x longer than seeing a digital photo on a screen. It also pumped a substantial lot more oxytocin to the brain (the same happy hormone that is produced after you have an orgasm!). Not just immediately, but they did a MRI scan a week later and the same parts of the brain were still firing up. Pretty amazing!

So who wants to look at digital photos now? I’ll have more of the real photos  please 🙂

4. Technology Changes Over Time

Remember CDs? What are they again? Apple has stopped putting them in their MacBooks and pretty much no one buys them anymore. Unfortunately, technology does change over time and it changes frequently. Those that captured and saved their wedding day on VHS, floppy disk or 35mm film can forget it!

It is important to have a digital backup of one’s photos, but traditional wedding albums are a sure way to protect their photos and ensure they will be around for a long time, no matter what happens with technology and even when the iPhone 45 comes out in 2092.

Handcrafted albums that use high quality, lasting materials and are definitely worth the expense and investment. Plus traditional wedding albums will never become obsolete no matter how much technology changes.

5. A Keepsake to Pass Down to Children and Future Generations

Wedding albums also make a wonderful heirloom to pass down from one generation to another. Most don’t think that far ahead, but by purchasing a wedding album, you are beginning your family history without even knowing it.

I’ve shown my wedding album to my kids and my daughter is obsessed with my wife’s wedding dress and how much she looked like a princess (she’s only 4), but imagine the same conversation about 30 years later when she’s a but older, and has her own children. She would say “this is your grandmother when she was married, and how beautiful she was and how young they looked.”

6. Albums can be completely personalized 

The best thing is, you can make your wedding album completely yours so not one album looks the same YAY! This part is certainly the most fun for all my clients!

If you have a colour you love, then there’s a great chance that Queensberry Albums will have it. They have over 50 colours to customise your album which will blow your mind away. There’s luxurious leathers from the finest tanneries in France, gorgeous European linens and buckrams, elegant silks from Japan and much more.

You can choose from a range of standard embossing to press into the album, but most of my clients opt to create their own customised embossing to make it completely “yours”. I’ve had clients who had their own logo designed for their wedding, and they were able to match exactly how it looked and put it on their album. Just like the picture below.

You can also choose the size and format (square, landscape or tall) and many other things such as the foil colour of your embossing (Gold, Silver, Rose Gold, Copper, Black and White).

If you count the amount of permutations and combinations there are, there’s probably over 500 possible options someone could choose. But you only need to decide on 3 things so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem!

Summary – Think of it as an Investment and not a cost

Those who took the time and spent the money to create a wedding album are always happy that they did and never regretted the decision. For people who didn’t make a wedding album, they probably still haven’t and will probably never will. Life gets in the way, things get busy and they simply don’t ever get around to it.

I often have clients coming back to me requesting to make a wedding album after 5 years because they realise now how important it is to have one. Some clients who I didn’t even photograph contact me and I have made their wedding albums with their photographs because their photographer didn’t see value it in it. Pretty sad but true.

A simple quote from my clients Wayne and Courtney sums it all up beautifully

” Our wedding album is more than we could imagined and even better than we thought. It’s beautiful and totally worth every cent. We will treasure it forever”

Wedding albums are simply timeless and can preserve memories for many years to come. See it as an investment to your future family and yourself and it really isn’t much at all. It may cost you $1000 to make an album, but over 50 years it’s only $20 a year or 5 cents a day to have one.

We hope that this blog will help you understand why couples should invest in a wedding album and you can see why wedding albums are important to have. I know you will thank me for it one day in 10, 20 years time.

For me, weddings albums matter so much that one of my goals is to ensure that all of my clients who book with me have one, no matter what shape, size or form, I’m one happy photographer. It’s something I’m super passionate about delivering to everyone for all the reasons I’ve mentioned.

At the end of the day, I can be sure that your wedding memories won’t be lost with one in your safe hands.

To see more of my Queensberry wedding albums that I’ve created for my clients, click albums

If you haven’t added an album to your collection and you really want one now after reading this, just message me and we’ll make it happen 🙂

I highly recommend you check out www.queensberry.com for their entire range of wedding albums.