Welcome to the brand spankin' new Worthington Photography Blog! We are Sam and Mel, a husband-wife photography team based in the "rivah city" of Richmond, Virginia. We hope you'll come on in, sit a spell, and browse through Mel's journal of our most recent shoots and adventures. If you wish to reminisce, you can still access posts from our old blog here. Enjoy!
Here’s a sneak peek at a few of the options in our new, Museum Art Book catalog. There are 19 different style options total with a variety of bindings, fine art papers and extras available to make each book unique. With prices starting at $1500 for a custom design, 13×10 or 10×10 book with 100 pages, Fiver isn’t the only one drooling in this office. I can’t wait to design his first year book! (Maybe he should turn a year old first…)
The vast majority of albums we order from Queensberry are made with black leather covers. Always a classic choice, always a crowd pleasure, but a little ho-hum for those of us designing albums day in and day out. Thank goodness for our vegan pals Allison and Evan whose wedding we shot many moons ago and whose album pictures I have been sitting on for almost as many moons. Leather wasn’t even an option for them so their book was bound to be bound differently.
The couple chose a gunmetal buckram cover that bounced nicely with the graphite color of the bridesmaid’s dresses. Instead of mounting the standard photo cover motif, I suggested using the birdy graphic from their invitation and wedding program to design something that matched.
Here’s the original stationary:
And the buckram cover with our custom cover motif:
The couple chose to add a wing (or gatefold) and flip page to their duo album. The reception was the perfect place to get flippy with it and the gatefold opens into a photo of the same church where Allison’s parents were married:
Here are a few of the layouts from the design software as well as some shots of the album so you can see how they came to life. We’re glad that Corey’s lack of socks was as memorable to Allison and Evan as it was to us, the layout with the guys hanging out before the ceremony might be my favorite album layout ever. Thanks for letting me have a little fun with that:
A&E, we miss y’all and can’t wait to drop in and replace the peace and quiet of your Blacksburg home with the sound of our screaming child sometime very soon.
Its time to catch up on albums that have arrived over the past – yeek – year or so. While I won’t blog every album we have designed or received, I have been photographing the books that could help couples to better visualize the various styles and options we offer and how they can come together to make a unique keepsake. We’re hoping this blog segment will be particularly helpful to our many long distance clients who are unable to come in and see our books up close and personal.
Though Shaena and Travis, who were married at Norfolk’s botanical gardens with a small and relaxed reception at the beach house where they honeymooned, celebrated a very untraditional wedding, they wanted a traditional style album with a creative twist. The blues of the sky at the gardens and the hues of the ocean water at their reception inspired them to choose an elegant blue, woven silk cover for their Queensberry matted album. In addition, we added silver pagemounts (fine art paper borders) to offset the photos, particularly the black and whites, and designed a few layouts with large images that spilled across the page to create a panoramic feel.
These photos show how the blue silk and black mats come together to make a traditional album with a contemporary feel. The silk has a slightly warm, metallic sheen to it for a very subtle shimmer to compliment the silver pagemount:
One of the signature features of Queensberry is the vellum introduction page that lifts to reveal the opening photo beneath:
Here are a few of the design layouts to give an idea of what an album looks like in the design phase:
These photos show how the blue of the cover bounces off the colors within and brought the design layouts to life in 3 dimensions:
Stay tuned for more design ideas!
Museum Art Books are a new addition to our album catalog. Coffee table style books, these versions by Couture are more akin to a monograph by your favorite artist: big, modern, beautifully crafted and printed, well composed and more about showcasing artwork than design.
Folks have been asking about how these books differ from the Coffee Table Art Books that we currently offer by Asuka and we can finally show you. For starters, Museum Art Books come in over 20 different styles – yep, over 20 – so they are extremely diverse. There are also over 10 different papers to choose from including linen, watercolor and even recycled papers for your binding. Like Queensberry, these books are printed and bound by hand for superior craftsmanship. As for the finer points, here are some photos so you can see for yourself…
Our first Museum Art Book is a first year documentary project with Baby Camille incorporating 6 different sessions from pregnancy through Camille’s first birthday. We chose to do a French Paris book at a size of 10×13 with linen paper. All Museum books come with a minimum of 100 pages, giving them more oompf than our 60 page Coffee Table Books as you can see (MAB on the left, CTB on the right):
In addition to being bigger and thicker, the Museum Art Book lacks the glossy casualness of the Coffee Table Book with heavy stock, textured paper. Color is less punchy and more demure and the pages are thicker.
I definitely dig on the texture of the linen pages:
Some characteristics of the French Paris style include the vellum cover over a white leather binding, printed end pages and the option to add vellum inserts with text or graphics.
We’re getting geared up to order a Berlin book next and design our first Museum Book with Megan and Tom’s wedding. Stay tuned – we’ll show you more of these as they come in!