Ahhhhhhh!!! I’ve got so much to blog about and I’m so behind. Palm Beach, Practical Horseman Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Stanley Hotel, the craziest wedding photographer convention on the planet, Vegas, perhaps an awesome new studio space — the list is endless! I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll delay the inevitable and instead post a link to an interview with me that just showed up on Don’t Box Us In.

The site’s description: A place for the different, the unique, the tasteful and the extraordinary in wedding photography, lets say it simply, welcome to Don’t Box Us In.

It’s pretty humbling and an enormous honor to be up there, because I discovered all my wedding photography heroes (literally) on the site. Check out the link! Also, thanks to Terje Aamodt for the headshot from a recent climbing trip to the Sierras. I think it’s the only one where I don’t look like a total dork.

Word!

The Wedding Photojournalist Association just released the results of its 2007 year end wedding photography contest, and I managed to snag a few awards. Hooray!

One, in the Ceremony category, was for this shot from Heather and Todd’s Vail wedding. They were married at the top of the mountain on the wedding deck. A storm was brewing all morning and things looked a little ominous, but they decided to go for it and risk the rain. The sun was fighting its way through the clouds for the whole ceremony, and as soon as they were pronounced husband and wife, the sun broke through and splashed them with a crazy ray of light. Everyone was talking about it afterward. The judges wrote, “A fantastic, intense moment enhanced by the incredible light and landscape. A painting.”

This next image picked up an award in the Reflections category, and it was one of my favorite shots of the year. You have to stare at it a while to figure out what’s going on. The bride’s mouth is poking through the hole in the hand mirror, and she’s also the one whose face is in reflected in the hand mirror that’s shown on the left side of the image. Wait, huh? What?

So… I shot this image into a huge mirror, and the only thing that’s not a reflection is the stuff on the far right hand side (the back of the hand mirror, the bride’s hand, and her mouth). Everything else is a reflection, and the bride’s eyes are a reflection in a reflection. The image is a complete mindbender that I still can’t always get my head around, even though I shot it.

Another image placed in a WPJA quarterly contest! This one placed in the ‘creative portrait’ category, which is pretty competitive since photographers are generally pretty on point with these pics and tend to shoot all sorts of crazy stuff.

Funny story behind this image: Brad and Gina got married at the Vista at Arrowhead in Beaver Creek this past Labor Day weekend. While Gina was getting ready I asked her about what kind of stuff she and Brad do on vacation. And she said they take lots of pictures. Of what, I wondered. Well, she said, of signs.

So we decided to make a bride and groom sign and see what would happen. Her dad actually got psyched about the whole thing and wound up making them himself, and then Gina, Brad and I snuck off after the ceremony for some couples portraits. Part way through we decided to bust out the signs… And, among other things, this is what happened. I totally love their faces. They were trying really hard to keep it together!

This post will be about the ZookBinders PhotoBook, which I think is the absolute perfect book to use for parent albums or for turning your engagement images into a signing book for your reception. Here, we’ll meet a few parent albums, both of which were mini versions of Megan and Andy’s ZookBook and Joe and Elitia’s ZookBook.

These things are totally cool. The covers are available in either a plain linen or a wrap-around photograph. I think the wrap-around option is what makes them so unique. Here’s Joe and Elitia’s cover.

And here’s Megan and Andy’s

Here’s another shot of Megan and Andy’s book, but with a better view of the binding.

And an inside shot of Megan and Andy’s, but with more binding views.

Again, like in the big ZookBooks, these books have no gutter in them so you don’t lose any part of the image. An inside shot of Megan and Andy’s:

Like I said, these books are rad for parent albums. You get the high ZookBinders quality at a more affordable rate. They’re only available when they mimic a big ZookBook though.

Hope this helps!

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Here’s another tour through another ZookBook so you can get an idea of the available variety. This album, Megan and Andy’s, has a more traditional feel to it compared to Elitia and Joe’s book, but it’s still got the contemporary coffee-table feel on the inside.

Megan and Andy chose a classy black leather with some silver stamping with their names and wedding date and location. I think this sort of cover is totally timeless; when they pull this thing out and look at it on their 50th wedding anniversary, it’ll still fit.

While Elitia and Joe chose black gliding, Megan and Andy chose silver gliding. I think it looks damn snazzy — and it matches their engraving. Once again, check out how nice those pages are! They’re so thick! It’s awesome.

Also, note that nice lay-flat binding. Here’s an inside spread of Megan getting ready; I don’t think the gutter margin takes away from the look that much.

Here’s a close-up shot of that binding. I really love the silver gliding contrasted against the black leather. Sweet!

Last, I really wanted to emphasize how thick these pages are. Here’s a shot of a single page — notice that as you turn the pages, they don’t sag down. They actually turn as if you’re flipping through a series of photographic prints.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Megan and Andy chose to do ZookBinders PhotoBooks for their parents. More on that in a following post, but here’s a peek of its wrap-around cover.

I figured I’d continue the Inside the Album blog posts with a post about mypublisher.com and iPhoto photo books, which are made by the same company. All my packages come with a rights-released CD, so you can opt to make one of these books. The upside is they’re really inexpensive and they’re easy to make at home, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it for your wedding album. Once you hold one of these in your hands and compare it to a ZookBook or a PictoBook, you’ll understand why; the difference is a zillion-fold, and I can’t overstate it. If you want, you can get a pretty big iPhoto or mypublisher.com book for around $100, so they’re cheap, but if you want to create a long-lasting family heirloom, I’d seriously consider a ZookBook or PhotoBook. Guaranteed, I wouldn’t be pulling out my iPhoto book in a decade and be terribly happy. I don’t want to knock these things; they’re great for certain applications and they’re undoubtedly going to revolutionize digital photography — but they’re not quite up to snuff for a wedding album.

A while back I made one as a promo book when I was first starting out. Here’s a detail shots of its cover.

Going inside the book, I’d have to say I was most dissatisfied with the print quality and color rendition (which resulted in a noticeable pink hue). Both are pretty obvious in the next pic. Granted, this image was shot with a macro lens, so what you’re seeing is pretty blown up, but the pixelation is still very apparent. I don’t think the dpi of the printers they use for these albums is good enough, personally.

Just as an aside, here’s a shot with the same lens and same distance of the Zookbinders PhotoBook, which makes a great album for parents, or for gifts. For sure there’s still some pixelation, but it’s vastly smaller. And as another aside, the pixelation on a full-size ZookBook is nonexistent because each page is an actual photographic print on photo paper that’s hand mounted to the page. So the only artifacts you see are actually the digital film grain, which on modern digital cameras is almost invisible.

I also wanted to point out the binding in the iPhoto books, so here’s the full page pic of the above image where you can see the pixelation. It gives you an idea of how big their faces are relative to the size of the page, but also check out the fact that the binding doesn’t lay flat. That’s kind of annoying because you can’t spread an image across both pages. You lose a ton of ink in the gutter of the book. And if you click on this image, you can still see pixelation in the larger version.

The last shot I have here is the book’s binding itself, which is basically glued together much like a magazine. I have a feeling these books will last about 5 years max until the glue starts to deteriorate.

All this said, though, the books are super inexpensive and they definitely have their place in today’s digital photography world. If you fill them with vacation pictures or pictures of your childhood, I think they’d make great keepsakes or presents for family during the holidays.

I got quite a few responses to a blog post a few weeks ago about wedding albums and album design, so I figured I’d write up a virtual tour through several wedding albums and parent albums. In this edition of Inside the Album, I’m going to focus on the Zookbook, made by Zookbinders. It’s sort of a ’standard’ album; it’s got a nice classy look to it, I love that I can make them square so the images have that widescreen aspect ratio, and there are a zillion really beautiful cover options to choose from. One of the best things about the Zookbook is that you can create miniatures of them and have them bound into a product called the PhotoBook, which makes fantastic parent albums.

Here’s Elitia and Joe’s super cool Zookbook.

Elitia had awesome taste and chose what Zookbinders refers to as a Napa leather cover — it’s basically a highly textured suede and it comes in a variety of colors. Her color, called Pear, really went well with the fall foliage that was in her pictures. The leather wraps all the way around the cover and is then hidden on the inside of the cover by page that’s kind of a thick black linen.Here’s a close-up of the texture of the Napa leathers.

One thing to note is that all Zookbooks have the option of having a cool cover cameo — that’s the image on the front of the cover. It’s a printed photograph that’s hand mounted onto the cover. All the cameos have black borders — you can check it out in this closeup.

Another thing to customize on the ZookBook is the gliding, which is the edging on the side of the pages. You can opt for black, silver and gold, among other colors. It’s amazing how high quality the ZookBooks are. Each page is maybe 5 mm or so — I’d say that one page in a ZookBook is the equivalent thickness of about 10 pages in a mypublisher.com or iPhoto book. Here’s another closeup; check out how thick the pages are.

Another cool thing is the lay-flat pages. On less expensive albums, you have a center gutter where the images disappear, but on the ZookBooks, you have nice lay-flat pages so you can spread huge panoramas across the pages. On the ZookBook there is an extremely small black center margin, but it’s almost not noticeable. Check it out:

Elitia and Joe also got a cool ZookBinders PhotoBook — more details on that one in a separate post.

Hoooray!

I just found I had an image place in the first ever Brides Magazine photo contest. Here’s a link to the contest.

This pic here scored 8th place in the dancing category. Big honor! National contest in a national magazine, judged by at least 3 Pulitzer Prize-winning photogs. Sweeeet!

Wow, this is just beyond cool. I got an email recently from Lara, whose wedding I shot over Labor Day in California. In it was a message from her mom. It’s about a zillion pages long, but here are some excerpts… This thing made my day! Here’s a slideshow from their wedding.

Hi Lara,

Another series I really enjoyed was the wedding party entering the barn through the large doors. Erica’s personality finally shows up. He did a great job capturing the personalities of the members of the wedding party. I really love the photo of our family that includes Leslie and Angela too.

Here’s another option for folks trying to figure out what to do about their album and parent albums. It can be difficult with so many choices, so I wanted to show what Elitia and Joe decided on: they made the Zookbinders Zookbook for their main album and the PhotoBook for the parent album. You can learn more about Zookbinders online at www.zookbinders.com.

When couples choose Zookbinders’ albums, I offer two options for parent albums. One is a duplicate of the main ZookBook, but in a smaller size, and the other is a new product called the PhotoBook. The PhotoBooks feature hard linen covers with wrap-around dust jackets that are custom designed from a photo. Since the cover isn’t a premium leather, the books are less expensive — and you can get a really unique cover to boot. Here’s the front of their parent book:

So the right hand side of the image will be what you see on the front of the book. The spine will be in the middle of the image, and the back of the cover will be the left side of the image.

Here’s a random spread from the inside of the album that utilizes a similar shot.

These two were fun. They called me in mid-September to inquire about shooting their intimate wedding in Aspen that was 2 or 3 weeks away. Their guest count was a total of four — four of their closest friends. Elitia was going to fly out from Denver but her flight was canceled due to a storm, so she had to drive all the way to Aspen in a hurry. She made it in time and they had a cool ceremony in the Hotel Jerome. We all cruised around downtown Aspen afterward, and Elitia, psyched for anything, just braved the snow in her dress. She didn’t even want Joe’s jacket because she didn’t want it in her pictures. Brrrr! I was sporting a down parka!