Notes on photographs, print, and the things worth keeping.
Occasional writing on album design, caring for your photographs, and the craft of turning files into heirlooms.
Occasional notes from the studio — album care, new makers, the odd journal piece. No spam, unsubscribe any time.
Why your wedding photos shouldn't live on a hard drive
Hard drives fail, formats change, and cloud accounts lapse. A printed album is the one form of your photographs almost guaranteed to outlive the technology they were made on. Here's why, and what to do about it.
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Can my wedding album be made by someone else?
Yes — and it's more common than you'd think. What I need from you, and why it doesn't step on your photographer's toes.
I got married years ago — can I still have a wedding album made?
There's no expiry date on a wedding album. Real answers for old drives, dead cloud accounts, and photographs that have waited.
How to choose photographs for your wedding album
Five hundred photographs and an album that holds sixty. A practical method for the hardest part of the process.
How to turn digital wedding photos into an album
Your photographer delivered a gallery link, not an album. The real process, from editing to sequencing to print.
How much does a professional wedding album cost in the UK?
Real starting prices and worked examples across nine album constructions, so you know roughly what to expect.
How many photos should you put in a wedding album?
Pages and photographs aren't the same number. Real page ranges by construction, and the pitfalls of too few or too many.
Photo book vs professional wedding album: what's the difference?
"Photo book" gets used loosely for two genuinely different things. What actually separates them.
Lay-flat vs flush-mount: what's the difference?
A plain-English guide to album binding and why it matters more than you'd think for how your spreads look.
What is a matted album?
Cut window mats over every print, so each photograph sits framed in its own right. How it's made, and who it suits.
Soft back vs hardback vs flush-mount: choosing a binding
Three constructions solve three different problems: cost, quantity and formality. Which one actually fits what you're printing.
Album paper stocks explained: silver halide, Indigo and fine art
Three genuinely different printing processes sit behind an album's paper options. What they actually are, and which suits which photographs.
The art of sequencing: telling a story in spreads
Why the order of images matters as much as the images themselves: lessons from twenty years of documentary practice.
Why prints look different to your screen
A decade-long overview of pre-press: examining how colour, paper, and ink impact the presentation of photographs.
The gift that makes people cry (in a good way)
A thoughtfully created album can often hold more significance than most other presents for a special milestone.
How to rescue a box of old family photographs
Practical first steps for sorting, scanning and protecting prints before time does any further damage.
What can, and can't, be restored
A look at real before-and-afters and an honest guide to what's recoverable from a damaged photograph.
Colourisation: how it works and what it costs
Black-and-white photographs brought into colour by hand, working from evidence rather than a guess. How it works, and what it costs.
Turning inherited photographs into a family archive
Once old family photographs are sorted and scanned, the real work starts: deciding what actually becomes an archive.