Portrait albums, printed properly

A portrait session ends with a gallery of forty photographs and a decision nobody makes. This is the album that decision was for: family sittings, personal portraits, boudoir and pets, sequenced and bound.

Portrait albums from £233.00, four to six weeks from approval

Any photographer's files

A gallery link, a download folder or a memory stick. You do not need your photographer involved.

Short albums done well

Twenty to forty photographs is the sweet spot. I will tell you if a set does not warrant more.

Paper chosen for skin tones

Cotton and textured stocks for black-and-white, lustre where colour and detail carry the picture.

Family sittings, individual and personal branding portraits, boudoir, pets, studio work of any kind. If it was photographed and you have the files, it can be an album, and you do not need to have booked me as your photographer to have one made.

The commonest brief here is a family session from the last year or two that was never printed. The second commonest is a portrait of someone who has since died, which I treat with the care that deserves.

Portrait albums are short by nature and better for it. Twenty to forty photographs makes a confident book; a sitting of two hundred frames does not need all two hundred, and printing them all is the surest way to make none of them matter.

Send everything and let the edit be my job. Tell me which frames you love and which you would rather never see again, and I will build the sequence around that before I show you anything.

Skin is where paper choice shows most. A cotton or textured stock flatters black-and-white and gives portraits a quiet, printed weight; a lustre surface holds colour and detail where clothing, hair and eyes are doing the work. Deep matte can mute a high-contrast set unexpectedly.

I choose the stock for the photographs rather than from a list, and I will tell you when your instinct and your images disagree. Samples of every paper are here at the studio if you would like to see them before deciding.

Boudoir albums are a regular part of this work and are treated as private by default. Nothing is published, shown as an example or used in marketing, ever, and I will not ask. Files are deleted twelve months after delivery, or sooner if you ask.

A slipcase or presentation box is worth considering here, for the obvious reason that an album on a shelf is an album anyone can open.

Story Book Graphistudio · from £326.00 Stitched on Amalfi cotton paper: the most sympathetic surface I print portraits on. View album → Baby Book Graphistudio · from £233.00 My most affordable lay-flat album, and a warm object for a short sitting. View album → Go Book Graphistudio · from £299.00 Lay-flat quality at a gentler price, with a box for something more private. View album →

Design 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. Read →

Print Why prints look different to your screen A decade in pre-press, in short: how colour, paper and ink change the way a photograph presents. Read →

Keeping 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. Read →

Start your album

07881 438911