Okay, so you shelled out a lot of money on your photographer’s top wedding photography package. Now what?

Well you have a number of options of course; you could make prints, you could design an album. Or you could do what a lot of folks do: let the photos sit on a USB drive or disk and plan on doing something with them in the future.

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that last option. Digital storage devices can last a long time…but what if you lose that disk? or that drive? what happens when your computer crashes and you lose your files? It’s obviously the worst case scenario but believe me, it happens.

I am a firm believer in two things: offering my wedding photography clients an easy way to make prints, and giving them keepsakes that will last a generation or two. They paid the money for one of my wedding packages so they might as well get some tangible items along with it.

Let’s start with prints; I can guarantee that no one reading this has sat down with their parents or grandparents and looked at their wedding photos digitally. Why is this? Well obviously the medium for storing files digitally probably didn’t exist at the time. But another reason is that photographers used to deliver prints to their clients. Prints last A LONG TIME. How long? How’s up to 100 years sound for ya? To put that into perspective a USB drive is likely to be obsolete and useless by 2030 if not sooner.

Every single photo shoot I work on gets uploaded to SmugMug. SmugMug is a great tool as it allows me to store the highest resolution images safely and at the same time enables me to offer printing services to my clients. You can buy tradtional paper prints or you can get metal prints, canvasses, postcards, thank you cards, etc. All orders are printed through a professional photo lab (the same lab I use to print from) and the best part is that the order is shipped directly to you! Anyone with the link can order too which makes it much easier to get prints to your friends and family.

Now let’s move on to the keepsakes. All of my wedding photography packages come with a custom made wooden keepsake box. The box is engraved with my logo and stained in a lovely dark ebony. Inside the box is a 16gb USB drive with all of the images from your wedding in high-resolution so you can make prints on your own if you like. I also include a set of 20 hand-selected 4×6 gift prints of my favorite images from your wedding day. I believe this box combo makes it not only much easier to keep track of and hold on to, but it also gives you a presentation piece with some WOW factor.

My higher end wedding packages include a 10×10 Premium Album in addition to the USB/Print box. My albums are bound in Linen and come in the color of your choice. Each album includes 10 spreads (40 sides) and the pages are ultra-thick with layflat binding. I also include a Lustre coating on the pages to help protect them from fingerprints and UV light which can fade them images over time.

So now why is all of this important?

Because these are the ways we present these moments to our future generations. After your wedding day the food will be consumed, the beer and wine drank, the dress will be dirty and may not fit in a few years. But you will always have these memories immortalized.