The beauty of a wedding, the love of a family session, the pride and possibility in a senior session, the joy in a newborn session—we capture precious moments. Those moments tell stories.

Beyond that, within every printed item, there is also a story. When an image or series of images are turned into tangible objects—prints, albums, or wall arts—the story can be told again and again. The more the images are seen, the more they become entrenched in our consciousness. This is how most family stories become legends. Printed photographs become the catalyst for those legends.

Are you asking yourself, “Should I sell albums and prints a part of my business?” If you aren’t, you are missing an opportunity, not only for your business but for your customers, their families, and generations to come.

Printed Photos are a Legacy

I have two prints from my parents’ wedding day—one formal image of them dressed up and one image of them together before the day really got started. As a son, and a parent to my own children, I crave more. I want to know the story behind the day, those silly little details that no one else may care about. How did my parents interact with their parents, my grandparents? Were they nervous? Did my dad need assistance tying his tie, or did my mom need help with her dress, and if so, who were the people that did that for them?

Let’s take the same situation into modern times. With today’s technology, all of those images that I want to see may have been captured by a wedding photographer and exist. But what If they only live on a USB drive? What if they only print a few images, like my parents did? Will the technology still exist to be able to open the drive and pull those images up for their children?

People are taking more photographs than ever, but they are printing out less. That’s where things get really interesting; if you think something is important enough to print, you are saying, “This image is meaningful enough to be turned into a real, physical, tangible item.” By printing, you are literally creating an artifact that can be passed down for generations to come. Every single person in the world has their own unique story, and it is our job as photographers to capture that story and share it in such a way that that story can last beyond their own lives.

The Power of Physical Connections

Currently, in universities, companies have been pushing digital textbooks. There have been many studies conducted to gauge the performance of students who used paper books versus students who used digital textbooks. Overwhelmingly, the results showed that students who use traditional paper textbooks crushed it on the tests. The reason? Paper has a 3D interaction. You can change your viewing angle; you can jump between pages and sections in an instant. Our ability to allow an image to become a part of our consciousness is far easier when it is printed.

There was another study that dealt with self-esteem in children. It showed a correlation between families who have prints on the walls and children who are less susceptible to low self-esteem. The concept of being a part of a group and being a part of a happy family is reinforced daily with these prints.

“Touching the photograph where a face is smiling or the shoulders, it is the same thing as touching a book when you read it,” says Craig Steinberg, a licensed child psychologist. “There’s a lot of stimulation of the brain when you have that sensory experience. That is a bit lost in the move to digital. You are touching a keyboard, mouse or a touchscreen but you are not touching the image.”

Bryan Caporicci
Our body remembers something better when there is a physical connection with it. When we can hold it, grasp it, turn it around in our hands, and feel it. It turns an image into a tangible memory.

Shoot with Intent and Design with Purpose

As a photographer, you should be thinking of printing long before you sit down to edit. During a shoot, printing should be forefront on your mind in order to capture the correct images and ultimately cut your workflow in half. It is crucial to shoot with intent to create a printed product that tells the full story.

For example, when photographing a wedding, you know to always get the emotional shots (for example: that moment when the mother of the bride puts her mother’s bracelet on her daughter, the bride). But if you shoot with intent, you know that images that support that story will help in an album design—the follow up shots that complete the story (close-up of the jewelry; the tear on mom’s cheek).

Rahul Khona
To accomplish this way of thinking, we need to move beyond the concept of “printing” as only prints, because a single print will never tell a full story. As children who grew up in the age of snapshots, we may have had them all around us, but we may only have had one or two of a specific story. As professional photographers today, we are hired to tell the whole story, and to create the fullest account from the images, and to put that in print. Then we have more than just slices of time but a full record of that moment.

The truth is: photographers who shoot with intent have less design changes from clients because they are telling a full story versus just trying to arrange images on a page. When a printed product is designed well, telling the complete narrative, it truly becomes an item the client cannot live without.

Archiving the Past

Whether your images are digital or print, at some point, they will all go into storage. As we are constantly adding to those images, we just can’t keep everything out at all times. Let’s take the wedding photo example again; at some point, those framed photos or albums are going to end up stored in a box. If the photographs weren’t printed out, that thumb drive might end up in that box instead. The difference between digital and print is that twenty years, thirty years, forty years later—when someone other than us finds this artifact, how are they going to access it?

Someday, that box will be found. Who knows if the same technology will exist? Sure, there may be some specialist who could recover the images, but maybe not. If you pull a print out of a box, you have access to a final artifact. You are basically guaranteeing that you will not disappear.  No matter who finds it, no matter who discovers it, they will have the final product.

My ninety-year-old grandmother may not know how to use a flash drive, but she loves seeing printed images. From cave paintings from times before the written word to the beauty of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the stunning artwork of the Italian Renaissance, humans have a documented history of telling their stories through photographs. Why has it declined in recent years? We owe it to coming generations to get those images out of digital form, onto the walls, and into albums.

Incorporating Printing into Your Business

We take photos to reassure ourselves that life is going to be okay. Our legacy will live beyond ourselves. We will not forget. We will not be forgotten. Printing is the realization of those emotions. The needs that we have in our own lives, the images that we want to capture for ourselves, those needs are what we should be translating for our clients.

Fundy Designer was created to make it easier to design albums. We make it painless to get your albums designed, saved, and ordered. Our newest addition, the Gallery Designer, simplifies the process of creating wall art for your clients. Drag and drop your images into the designer to allow your clients to instantly see what your beautiful images will look like hanging in their homes.

We’ve taken the pain out of designing gorgeous keepsake albums and creating gallery walls for your clients because we want them to be actualized. Those albums that you love in your own homes? Your clients want that too; they just may not know it. We want to help you help them realize that.

It is key to talk about printing images with your clients. Do it early. Do it often. Make sure they realize the relevance of doing so. If you can convey the importance of creating their legacy and preserving their story, then it will make your business easier. The products sell themselves.

Printing images is important not just for enjoyment today but for generations to come. You want tangible keepsakes for your children and grandchildren, and your clients do too—it is the most important thing you can deliver as a photographer.

“If you don’t think photos are important,
wait until they are all you have left.”
–Lynn Cartia

Types of Albums and Uses

There are four main types of albums. It’s very important to have a clear understanding of different album types, how they are made and their main function in running a profitable studio.

Photo credit: Melanie Nashan at Nashan Photographers

1. The Matted Album

The popularity of matted albums is waning, but there are still plenty of brides looking for them. The matted album is made with images under mattes and cutouts revealing the images. Much like a photo in a photo frame with a matte, a matted album usually has multiple openings cut into the mattes for displaying multiple images. It is possible both to order pre-designed mattes and to assemble pre-designed albums, or do a custom-designed album and the album company will custom cut mattes based on your design.

Matted albums generally are more expensive than other options. In addition to the binding, printing and so forth, you’re also paying for the mattes. Because of the higher costs, most matted albums are sold as wedding albums, which can fetch a higher price. There are some album manufacturers that sell pre-made albums with pre-made mattes and it is possible to produce these at very similar costs to lower-priced flush mount albums.

2. Flush Mount Albums

Flush mounts are the dominant album in the world of digital photography. They combine the unlimited possibility of digital layout and design, with the beauty of old-world, handcrafted books. As a photographer, flush mount albums allow you to present your photography as a work of art. Additionally, the pages are thicker than press-printed albums. When they are manufactured, the prints are adhered to a thick card backing. This gives the pages a heavier, more durable feeling that increases the perceived value over press printed books. The majority of flush mount albums are made with photo paper and prints. The prints are often laminated with a protective film or spray. There are a few flush mount album manufacturers who will use press prints to make flush mount albums. I’m not a fan of that process.

Flush mount albums can be used for both wedding and portrait albums. Most wedding studios carry flush mount albums of some sort. Studios are able to sell wedding albums that the majority of clients cannot reproduce easily at Costco or through a service like iPhoto.

There are a number of photographers who sell flush mount albums as portrait albums. Personally, I find this difficult as most flush mount albums are only available with a minimum of 20 pages. I find 20 pages to be too many for a typical portrait shoot. Sure, photographers can fill 20 pages, but are the pages filled with their best work? Additionally, a 20-page flush mount album is at a high enough price point that the retail price a photographer needs to charge will be higher than the average portrait client will want to pay.

3. Press printed books

Press printed books are extremely popular. It seems that every lab in the country is offering these books at very inexpensive prices. The problem is that Costco, Walmart and Walgreens sell them too. I’m not a big fan of offering press books in the studio. The reason simply has to do with profit. The process of designing an album, getting it approved by the client, uploading the design and ordering it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. That means a significant amount of the cost of producing albums is in the labor. If we choose a cheaper press printed book that has more pages than a self mount, we are basically increasing our costs for an album that sells at a lower price.

Most people use press printed books as inexpensive options for wedding albums and portrait albums. I don’t recommend this as a business strategy. It’s simply taking money out of your pocket. Some people use press printed books as parent album options. This is really the only case that I would recommend using press printed books. However, I would still offer a flush mount as a parent album over a press printed book.

4. Self Mount Albums

Self mount albums had a “low-brow” reputation for awhile due to cheap Chinese imports of self mount albums with cheap, fake leather and poor construction. With the emergence of new flush mount album companies, self mount albums have been given a new life. They sport sturdy construction and beautiful high-end cover options. As an example, Finao Albums offers dozens of high-end Japanese and Italian art fabrics for its self mount albums and dozens of leathers and options. All of these choices help you provide a higher end product, which will help you command a higher price.

When choosing which albums to offer, many photographers buy on price. I recommend buying on profit. With a higher quality album (which may be slightly more expensive) we often can command a higher price and increase profit per album, even though our costs might be higher.

How to Price your Albums

Your three primary costs are the cost of the album, the labor for designing the album, and shipping and handling. To price correctly, you must know your costs.

There is no magic number for the price of an album. But there is a magic formula. In order to calculate this formula you need to simply know the cost of the album, the cost of the labor to design it and the cost of shipping. Some may not want to mark up shipping. It takes time to get the shipped item, unpack it, check it, repackage it and then ship it off. Handling is a big cost and it should be accounted for and marked up.

Here is an example:
$200 = cost of album
$75 = cost of design (3 hrs)
$15 = cost of shipping

We add these up for a total of $290. Now, we need to figure out the retail price based on cost of goods. Most pros in the industry that have been around for any length of time agree that you need at least 35% cost of goods pricing.

So, take your cost, $290, and divide by 0.35 (35%)
$290 ÷ 0.35 = $828
So, retail should be at least $828 or $900 for a nice round number.

The key to selling albums is giving the client easy choices and pre-selling. These two simple things will increase album sales more than just about anything else.

How to Price

With albums, having three size choices along with cover upgrades is the most profitable form of album pricing. Also, the ability to add pages for an extra fee can increase back-end sales.

Below I have some fictitious portrait album prices. These will be quite low for most wedding albums. The goal here is to show what I think is important in album pricing. It is important to give choices in size. Here I have three size choices. You don’t want to overwhelm your client with a ton of sizing choices. Even if your album company offers every size under the sun, you don’t want to offer them, too. I like to offer square albums and horizontal albums. Feel free to offer vertical albums also, if that is what you like.

Photo Credit: Melanie Nashan at Nashan Photographers

How to Sell

Albums are all about the pre-sell. If clients aren’t interested in getting an album before you take pictures, chances are they won’t change their minds later on. Get them interested upfront. In all in-person contact with your clients, have them hold sample albums in their hands. They also need to be engaged in the discussion about albums. Whether it’s a portrait or a wedding client, pick up your most popular sample album and hand it to your client and say, “Most of our clients this year purchased this album.” Let them flip through the album and then start asking them about their preferences. “Do you prefer square albums like this, or horizontal albums like the ones over there?” Or, “Do you like the newer photo covers or the more traditional leather albums?”

We are doing two things here. First, we are making sure we don’t make a mistake. If the client loves traditional leather-bound albums and we are excitedly showing off our cool new metal-covered albums, what are they going to do? Decide they just don’t want an album. We’re also asking them to take emotional ownership of an album. Once this emotional ownership is established, getting them to take physical ownership is just filling out the order sheet.

Albums are tactile. Clients need to touch and feel them. As photographers, we need to explain why we are excited about our albums and why we believe clients should get an album. I truly believe that each and every portrait or wedding should end in an album. It is a final, physical representation of something so special, something that happens so few times in a lifetime that we need to preserve it. Since I really do believe this, it’s not difficult for me to communicate that sincerity with my clients.

Planning Your Design

One of the biggest problems that photographers face is the ‘deer in the headlights’ problem. Too much information in front of you makes you freeze up. Break down the design process and cut your design time.

In the photo above you can see a list of folders, titled Cover, Page 01, Page 02-03, etc. These folders represent the pages of the album. I begin each album design by organizing images into specific page folders. Most photographers break images down into “moments of the day”–getting ready, ceremony, etc. While this is helpful, it is still very difficult to organize the images into page designs while you are designing. By breaking down the images into pages, you can view just the images going into that page design. It is a tremendous help. Just by making these decisions before beginning design, you’ll save LOTS of time.

While organizing my images, I go through the following process.

1. I choose the cover image first.
2. I choose the last page of the album.
3. I organize pages, by ONE main image and accent images to go with that image.

In the above screenshot, you can see that the outdoor image can serve as the main image and that the other images are accent images. By working with this frame of mind, sorting images is a piece of cake. To the right you can see the final design.

First Things First, Start with the Cover

Designing the cover is often the trickiest part. With photo wrap covers, as with any cover, you’ll want to get the EXACT specs from your vendor. Often cover specs are different from page specs.

For cutouts, all you should need to do is crop the photo to the correct size. For example, a 5×5 cutout will require an image cropped to 5×5. For specialty covers, like metal and plexiglass, your vendor will have specific templates. This is due to the fact that the left side of the metal, plexi or even wood is covered up by the leather that binds the rest of the album.

First Page

When you open up a book and go to the first page, it is always on the right hand side. And it is always a single page. Many album companies, especially some flush mount companies, use a full spread as the first page. When you open these books, the first page falls on the left side and is a double page spread. So, pages one and two are connected, and pages three and four, etc. Make sure you know whether the first page of your album is a single page that starts on the right side, or a double page spread that starts on the left.

Spreads

Spreads are easy, just start designing, making sure that your designs focus on a main image with accent images.

You can only sell what you truly believe in

It’s essential that you believe in your products in order to sell them. If you only choose an album because it fits your budget and you think that it will fit your clients’ budgets, chances are it won’t sell.

Deep down we all know this. We’ve all been sold something by someone who truly believed in the product, whether it was a new car or an iPhone or that cool, new fake grass, so we don’t ever have to mow the lawn again. The point is, if you don’t believe in the albums you’ve chosen for your clients, they won’t believe in them either, and you won’t sell them. Choose your albums carefully. Not only do they need to be top quality, but they also need to fit your personality. Find an album company that fits your personality, promote your albums, sell them correctly and albums easily can be an enormous profit center for you and your studio.

Design Gorgeous Albums

You can design gorgeous albums, right in Photoshop with Album Builder. By using the Organize feature, which I referenced earlier, it makes the design process much more efficient. And since you’re using Photoshop, you can easily edit photos right on the page, use filters, add textures and change the background color or add a design.