Worthington Photography

Beachy Keen: Shaena and Travis’ Album

February 24th, 2010

panorama2

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:

cover1

silktexture

One of the signature features of Queensberry is the vellum introduction page that lifts to reveal the opening photo beneath:

openvellum

Here are a few of the design layouts to give an idea of what an album looks like in the design phase:

ceremony

family-sequence

beach

firstdance

These photos show how the blue of the cover bounces off the colors within and brought the design layouts to life in 3 dimensions:

blueblock

dancecloseup

jump

panorama

Stay tuned for more design ideas!

Posted by Mel @ 5:05 pm, in Albums, Weddings | 1 comment | Permalink

Brand New: Museum Art Books

August 26th, 2009

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!

Posted by Mel @ 6:00 pm, in Albums, News, Wee Ones | 2 Comments | Permalink

Queensberry Matted Albums

February 24th, 2009

Always more books to share… The Queensberry matted album is a classic choice, even an unconventional wedding appears timeless in a matted book.

Amy and Mike’s elegant wedding at Virginia Crossings Resort is bound in black. What’s true for cocktail dresses is also true for albums: you can’t go wrong with black. In addition to a black leather cover, their pages are made of black mats, pagemounts and black edging. Edging is a curb applied to the rim of each mat for protective and aesthetic purposes. Edging gives the matted book both heft and a formal appearance, here’s what it looks like:

Because the coloring of Amy and Mike’s wedding warm for fall, we converted all the black and whites in their album to a warm tone as well… meaning the shadows were converted from a blue black to a brown black. Warm tone black and white is a subtle effect, something more likely to be appreciated on a subconscious level. Can you notice it in the photos below?

One perk about doing a matted album with Queensberry is that you can maintain a panorama across the layout spread, like so:

And of course, we love the translucent vellum opening pages in our Queensberry books:

Carrie and Ben added contrast to their book of photos from their fun, preppy-cool wedding. Like Amy and Mike, they chose a black leather cover with black mats but added an ivory pagemount and edging, creating a white border around each matted photo as well as a white binding page. Here’s what their combination looks like:

Stay tuned for more books soon…

Posted by Mel @ 9:22 pm, in Albums | 1 comment | Permalink

Queensberry Photo Front Covers

February 5th, 2009

Its February, which means I have gone into album design mode: a state similar to hibernation in bears where an event photographer curls up with a hot beverage in the corner of a coffee shop and goes into a trance while playing what appears to be a strange form of Tetris with album design software as the hours fly by unnoticed.

Queensberry remains our favorite album makers because of the wide variety of materials and options available for making each book personal and unique. A couple recent orders included photo front covers: an option where a wedding image is imprinted in the binding itself, magically seamless from the adjoining leather binding. Photo front covers can be printed across the cover, across 1/2 of the cover or across 1/4 of it. Both couples featured here chose a 1/2 photo front cover on their 12×12 books, making their albums visually appealing before they are even opened for viewing. The decision to use black and white imagery keeps their books looking classic:

One nice perk of choosing a photo front cover is that any digital copy albums ordered for parents will have a matching photo front cover free of charge! Normally you can’t get a cover motif on a copy album so its a great deal.

In addition to having photo front covers, both these books are also duo albums, combining both matted and flush mount pages. This layout demonstrates a flush mount page for example: the photo of the dining room is mounted flush to the edge of the page:

Duos are great books because matted pages can be included in the same book as flush mount pages. In fact, flush images and matted images can even appear on the same layout. In other words, we can make configurations where an image beneath a matt is mounted flush to any page edge, as in the b/w photo on the page pictured below. We are never confined by the page edge when designing a duo book:

Queensberry also allows matted photos to cross the seam of a two page layout, allowing information to flow freely from one page to the next:

Here are a few more photos of various layouts from both of these albums to give you a sense of the possibilities when you combine both matted and flush images on the same page. The duo rules…