Federer Photography

One of the more common questions I get is “What are your albums like?”.  I generally respond “Awesomeness in album form”, but that’s not very descriptive; so here is an attempt to actually help answer that question properly.

When you order an album from me, we start by talking about cover styles, number of leaves, size, etc — just getting a rough idea of what my constraints are. I, typically, am then left to my own devices to design the album the best I can to tell the story of the day.  When that first draft is done I send electronic copies of the album out; in a flurry of e-mails or meetings we swap in/out images, change designs and layouts, add pages, reprocess images, etc until we have the 100% perfect album for the client.

Then I go to production and the client receives their album in a month or two.  When it arrives, the 100% custom, handcrafted album is wrapped with handmade pineapple leaf paper, recycled mulberry ribbon, and a skeleton leaf as an accent.  The ‘true’ cover is actually protected by another thin layer of paper.  Check it out:

Great – so it shows up and looks sweet, but what about the actual album?

This particular wedding album is a 9×12 25-leaf album.  The cover is made with a metallic print bonded to the back of a beveled piece of cystal acrylic.  It’s hard to convey what a metallic print looks like – it’s one of those ‘must see’ things; it works awesome on the right image.  I also do covers on metal, canvas, leather, etc.

The back and spine is a textured leather, the pages are thick and stiff, and the binding is solid yet flexible.  The whole book reeks of craftsmanship – you are getting your wedding images to last for generations – your album should too.

The album innards are made of the highest-grade photographic prints.  The image can span the ‘crease’ – allowing dramatic double-page spreads and a ton of creative design options.  (check out the crease photographs below)  The prints, effectively, ARE the pages; this ain’t your grandmas slip-in-a-bunch-of-4×6’s album.  The pages are roughly the thickness of a quarter (yes, for those of you curious, that’s a Minnesota quarter in the image below… 😉 ).

This album has one of my favorite pages ever in it.  It’s relatively common that the last song of the night everyone sways back and forth to “Piano Man”,  but those that went to St. John’s University will understand this must be done with all the males pants’ around their ankles.  So, of course, I’ve got more than my fair share of photographs of Nate’s tookus. 🙂  As a joke on the last page of the first draft, I dropped in a “The End” page…  Nate liked it and it made the final cut.  I love my clients!

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Mindy Erickson, of Custom Stoneware, contacted me to do some product photographs of her cool pottery.  She makes some really beautiful pieces that I wish had found a way into my cupboards. 😉   It was a different job for me, but it was very interesting to do; the attention to every single detail of shadow, light, reflection, and color was significantly different than my standard ‘people’ and wedding photography – where those things are important, but can’t be ‘tweaked endlessly’ and also fall second to the main goal; which, for me, is emotion, connection, and the scene as a whole.  Remove the ’emotion’ and once-in-a-lifetime-ness, and suddenly the rest of what makes an image falls into stark clarity.

Spending an hour creating only a few images was a frustrating, yet strangely peaceful, zen-like, process.

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