Wedding Albums - Traditional Album Or Wedding Photo Book?

The wedding album until recently has been the last bastion of the traditional photo album. Glossy prints carefully preserved on acid free mounts, interleaved with tissue paper pages, again acid-free, are designed to make those precious photos last a lifetime. But there is a new wave of wedding album and wedding photography challenging the traditional old-style look. The wedding photo book, or storybook album, is becoming more and more popular with brides, providing a creative alternative that can be easily personalised to reflect your individual wedding style.

Traditional wedding albums tend to have very simple layouts with not much variety. They are designed to hold a small number of large prints. This format suited the old-style of wedding photography, where there were a set number of formal poses and group shots to include in the album.

Today's style of more informal wedding photography results in so many more shots, both posed bride and groom shots and spontaneous moments captured throughout the day. To fit all of these shots in a traditional wedding album would cost a fortune in printing, but with a printed photo book all your favourite moments can be part of the album. Full page shots can alternate with pages full of fun shots collaged together giving more scope to the creativity of the photographer and allowing the bride and groom's individual style to shine through.

Digital photography makes wedding photo books very versatile. Because you no longer need to have individual prints made of your favourite photos for your wedding album, you can gather all your wedding photos together digitally. If you want you can combine the professional photographs taken by your wedding photographer with the best of those taken by family and friends. If you are planning a wedding on a tight budget, compiling your own wedding album as a photo book can save you money, as long as you are prepared to spend the time required to sort through all the photos and design a layout for it.

Wedding photo books shouldn't be seen as a cheap alternative to the traditional weeding album however. They can be just as elegant as a traditional album, with board covers and tooled gold writing if desired, but have the advantage of a more personalized style. Your wedding album can become a gorgeous glossy coffee table photo book, where you are the stars of the show, a reportage photo story that tells the events of the day in glorious Technicolor, recalling precious moments that you hardly had time to appreciate on the day, but which you can look back upon year after year and enjoy in retrospect.

If you still feel the need for a traditional wedding album, there's no reason you shouldn't have a photo book as well. The wedding album can contain all the more formal shots and the photo book becomes a more informal record of the day.