Album of the Year. Every year.
Every family ends up with The One. The picture that makes it to the wall, where everybody is looking at the camera at the same time, an event that occurs roughly as often as a total eclipse and requires about the same amount of planning.
I get that shot for you. I'm good at it. Your mother-in-law will ask for it and she's not wrong to.
But let's be honest about what it is. It's a headshot with more people in it.
One picture tells someone who you are. Here we are, these are our faces, that tree behind us was nice. What it cannot do is tell anybody what that year was actually like.
A collection, not a headshot
My goal is to paint a story. A collection that says hey, this is who we are right now.
The way your daughter hangs onto your dress and hides between your legs. The way your son picks things up off the ground and hands them to you one at a time, a rock, a leaf, another rock. The way your husband gives you that look when your daughter makes the exact face you make when you want something.
That's why the Picture Book comes back with 75+ images and not eight. Eight is a wall. Seventy-five is a year.
Down there in the dark
Here's the honest life cycle of a family gallery. It lands in your inbox, you open it that night, you send six photos to your mom, one becomes your lock screen, and two go on Instagram. Then it sits.
Not because you stopped caring about it. Because a phone is a terrible place to look at anything twice.
There are 14,000 pictures on yours. Somewhere in there are the ones I sent you, keeping company with 200 screenshots, a video of a parking garage you have no memory of filming, and eleven nearly identical photographs of a dog. You will never scroll to the good ones. Nobody has ever scrolled to the good ones. They're down there in the dark like the Titanic.
And yes, you're going to make a beautiful album someday. Everyone is. Someday is a lovely place and no one has ever been there.
The hum of the ceiling fan
Finally the kids have settled into a soft slumber. You're on the couch listening to the hum of the ceiling fan, not quite ready for bed, and there's a stack on the coffee table. You pick up the top one without really deciding to.
Twenty minutes, gone.
Because it's all in there. How small she was in your arms, which you cannot believe even though you were the one holding her. And your son, who spent that entire year with a finger up his nose, now preserved across several spreads for the historical record. You were mortified at the time. It's the funniest page in the book now. Everything humiliating becomes hilarious on a long enough timeline.
The ups and the downs of one year sitting next to each other on the same page, which is more or less the order they arrived in.
Sometimes it isn't the best looking image you want. It's the best feeling one.
Ten volumes of it, in order
My mom kept an album for every year my sister and I were growing up. Every time I came home from college we'd end up on the floor with them.
That's the version I actually think about. Not this year's coffee table. The one where your oldest comes home at twenty, drops a bag in the hallway, and at some point that weekend picks up the stack without anyone asking him to.
He isn't looking for a good photo. He's looking for evidence that it was good, and that he was loved, and that there were a lot of great days in there.
And there it is. Ten volumes of it, in order.
Old memories build new ones. I don't have a better argument for printing something than that.
Four rules, none of them hard
Pick 20, not 200
Galleries don't go unprinted because you're lazy. Choosing between 75 good photographs at 10pm is real work, and you already made too many decisions today and spent a little too long doom scrolling in the bathroom.
Small and often beats big and never
A modest album finished this month will outrun the leather-bound heirloom masterpiece you plan to assemble during all that free time you will never have.
Do it while you still remember why
The nose is funny because you were there. In six years it's just a kid with a finger up his nose, and frankly that's most kids.
Go look at your gallery
Mine stay live for six months. If we shot last spring, download everything today, while the feelings are still fresh, because sometimes it isn't the best looking image you want. It's the best feeling one.
The Print Edition
All four of those rules assume you're doing it yourself, which plenty of people do and should. This is the version where you don't.
An 8x10 magazine of your session. Photo cover, forty pages, printed on a smooth matte press paper that doesn't fight the way I grade a session. No gloss, no glare, nothing that turns your living room lamp into a hotspot across your daughter's face. It ships straight to your door.
8 x 10 · 40 pages · about 55 photographs · $200
Why it's a magazine
The heirloom kind lives in a closet. It comes out for company and somebody says be careful with that. A magazine gets left on the coffee table and picked up by a four year old with sticky hands, which is the entire point. You wanted the thing that gets opened, not the thing that gets preserved.
Why fifty five and not seventy five
Your gallery still holds everything. Every image, all yours, all downloadable, nothing held back. But seventy five photographs is an archive, not a story. Somewhere inside it is the version where nothing repeats and every page turn earns itself, and finding that takes somebody sitting down with all of them and making decisions. So I take your gallery and I choose. Around fifty five frames, in the order your afternoon actually happened, sequenced so the quiet ones land where they should and the loud ones get room.
What it costs
$200, on top of your session. It doesn't replace anything and it doesn't change what lands in your gallery. Add it when you book, or wait until you've seen your photos and know for certain this is the afternoon you want on paper. Both work.
When it arrives
Your gallery comes back about two weeks after we shoot. If you added the Print Edition when you booked, it follows roughly two weeks after that, so about a month from the day of your session. If you decide once you've seen your gallery, count about two weeks from the day you say go.
Do that a few times and you've got a shelf. Eventually somebody comes home from college and goes through the entire thing.
One picture on a wall shows who you are. An album tells the story.
Want yours in print?
Mention The Print Edition any time before your gallery goes out. If you haven't booked a session yet, that part comes first.
Get in touch See sessions and pricing