When you’re talking to potential photographers, one of the ways they’ll differentiate themselves is in the products they’ll offer you, and for many couples, the most important product will be the album. You may want digital files, prints, canvases, thank-you cards, but almost all couples will want an album of some kind. I thought it would be worthwhile writing a post about the various kinds of photo album available in the market, since this can be a little confusing.
There are 3 main types. The first, and most traditional, is called a matted album. If you look at your grandparents’ wedding album, it’s most likely to be in this style. Matted album pages are made up of 2 parts; the actual print, with a thick card layer (the matte) fixed on top. You view the images through apertures cut into the matte, which is typically black or cream/white. So the album pages are pretty thick, especially if they’re protected by metal page corners. Matted albums have a couple of advantages. Firstly, the mat protects the prints when the book is closed, and the pages will tend to have a more classic, traditional style, so they’ll last well. Secondly, most matted albums will lay flat when opened, so that you can view 2 sides at a time. The downside is that because each side is assembled separately, you can’t have images going across the book gutter, which reduces the visual impact.
Secondly we have coffee table books. This is a much more contemporary style album that is inspired by the publishing world, and it has glossy paper pages that mimic modern fashion magazines. Pages can contain a huge range of design elements – multiple images fading into each other, text or graphics, colourful backgrounds, or anything your album designer can dream of. That’s the main advantage of coffee table books; the pages can be designed exactly as you want them. They can be minimalist or complex, traditional or contemporary, colourful or mono, and any combination of these throughout the book. Unfortunately, that’s also the main disadvantage; the funky graphics you love this year might make you cringe in 5, 15 and 25 years’ time. Also, these books tend not to lie completely flat, which also reduces their visual impact. And those thin pages are bound to be more prone to wear and tear than thick matted pages.
Thirdly, there’s a hybrid style of album called flushmount. It basically combines the thick pages of the matted album with the design flexibility of the coffee table. A flushmount page is a single print that is permanently glued onto a thick page. Depending on the specific manufacturer, this may be a double spread or a single side. The advantages are that they tend to lie flat when opened, so you can fully appreciate a double spread, and you can also print right across the gutter so that you can have images across a full double spread. The disadvantage with most flushmount manufacturers use a printing process where over time, as the book is opened and closed, a discoloured stripe (usually blue or pink) may appear in the gutter.
I’ll come clean and say that currently, I exclusively offer flushmount albums. They are seriously high quality, with beautiful leather covers, and I have found one of the very few manufacturers that print completely seamlessly across the gutter – you get massive double spread images that leap off the page. They really showcase your images, tell the stories of the day without restrictions, and because my page designs are very clean, they’ll date well (though I can’t make the same promise about your outfit!). I believe that flushmount albums offer the best of all worlds, which is what such an important set of memories deserves.
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