Wedding Albums – Are They Really Necessary?

I’m not sure if anyone else shares this kind of memory, but I remember sitting with my parents on their wedding anniversary and looking through their wedding album. Pictures of my uncle as a gawky 15 year old made my brother laugh so hard that he fell off the bed – soon we were all in fits of giggles. This memory was triggered when it came time to choose my own wedding photographer, and that is how I knew that a wedding album would have to be amongst the package that we chose.

With iPhones and iPads, social media photo sharing and huge portable harddrives, a printed album can seem really out-dated; when photos can be emailed, stored on a computer, hard drive or a disk, a photo album can seem like just another dust collector. But having worked alongside a data recovery agent, I know that when technology fails – which it does often and easily – there is a lot of heartache at the realisation that printing the favourite family photo was still on the to do list, or the photos of your wedding day were suddenly gone without a trace.

A disk of wedding photos can be a great way of keeping all of the snaps that didn’t make the album so you can look back on them and reminisce. If you ever open the storage box where that disk is kept again. But the way technology is advancing, some computers no longer even have a disk drive as they get phased out like floppy disks in favour of USB’s – and who’s to say USB’s aren’t next to go!?

Wedding albums are more than just a few snaps of your day in one neat and tidy book. They are the story of your wedding day told in beautiful pictures and just looking at it brings back those feelings of joy. Your album is a real story teller, presenting your wedding day from start to finish, that first tear dad shed as you showed him your finished outfit, to that last laugh on the dance floor when you tried to pull off the sprinkler dance move in your wedding dress!

Your wedding album is the public display and permanent record of your love, and what your love has created. There is no way that those emotions, nor their visual displays, could ever be out-dated. It is your family heirloom and can be all that is left behind after loved ones pass, or it can be a moment to share with Grandma each visit. Where memories fail, photos thankfully fill the gap so we can forever be filled with the happiness we have been blessed with.

I know that 10 years from now, I’m probably not going to remember the moment that our pageboy picked a flower for the bridesmaids at our wedding. But thanks to our wedding photographer that moment in time, along with many others, have been captured and are on display in our very own wedding album. I can’t wait to one day share it with our kids so they can see their parents on one of the happiest days of our lives… or just to laugh at so hard (at their dad, not their mum!) that they can’t help but fall off the bed!

Image by Jade Norwood Photography

Ms Gingham says: I love albums. I think that having a tactile item you can leaf through is beautiful.

Jade of Jade Norwood Photography says: “It’s one thing to take pictures but another thing entirely to create works of art for families, couples and weddings.”