Click play above to watch me flip through our family photo album!

I’ve been printing my photos since I first got into photography 15 years ago. In fact, I decided I’d pursue the art further when I won a local photo contest in 6th grade - I’d entered a print of a butterfly. Photographs and collections of photographs have been a part of my life for a decade and a half, and have been the focus of my business from the very beginning. So, to be able to curate my work into our own family heirloom was pretty special.

Ordinarily when I do these album blog posts, I link the video and then discuss the specs. But as I spend hours perfecting layouts so that they illustrate the story of each client, from now on I’ll be sharing each of the spreads (in order) as well so that I can get into the “why’s” behind my choices.

As I mentioned in our family photoshoot blog post, from the very beginning Mom knew she wanted to include old family photos to pair with these latest ones. I must have gotten my affinity for photo albums from her because we have a whole shelf full of them at home, organized by year and by the person featured most (Jake and I each have several of our own albums.) Mom spent hours looking through all of these old photos, selecting her very favorites while reliving all of the old memories that these hallowed pages held. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t there to do that with her!

For the very first page of our storybook, I wanted to show the “then and now” of the foundation of our family by juxtaposing the image of Mom and Dad’s wedding rings with the photo taken 29 years before as they exited their wedding. This page set the scene.

Ordinarily, I always use a full-spread image for the first page but since I did something special for page 1, I did so on the second instead. We’re a little serious sometimes; I wanted to open the book with a reminder not to mess with us.

The next two pages were all about introducing the rest of the characters in the story. I wanted to include a grandparents’ page right at the beginning since they’re obviously the reasons we’re all here.

While I was photographing, I tried to keep in mind all of the pairings I might want to include in the album, and I knew that a page showing the contrasting earliest and most recent photos of us was a must.

After that, in chronological order I began weaving the photos from our summer photoshoot with their film print counterparts, continually bringing together the old and new. Some pairings I hadn’t even thought about before creating the album - like the page with Dad reading to Jake and me beside the image of Mom and Dad looking at each other through the sun room window (still on the same couch, I’m pretty sure) - but they somehow all started to fall into place.

I made sure each parent got photos with each kid individually so that each pair would get its own page, and sometime even the poses were the same as the original photos, totally by accident. Was I cute or what?!

The most interesting part of this project was showing and celebrating the passage of time - putting as much of our story into these 30 pages as possible. The above album spread features a photo from each of the places Mom and Dad have lived together (and me too, except I don’t remember the first one!) As the spaces people in habit are just as telling about their personalities as their portraits, it was important to me to include a photo of each place, particularly to evoke all of the fond memories that each brings up.

By the way, the negative space is varied in this post because its varied on each of the pages as well.

I love symmetry, so for the last image I wanted to use a picture from the same location as the second page, to bookend the photos. But, rather than a gameface, I wanted to end with a smile, since this whole experience of photographing and then storytelling for my own family was such an enjoyable one.

I’m not sure what the protocol is for creating the next album in our family collection since we used photos from all during our childhoods for this one already. I’m envisioning a photoshoot similar to this (as far as half with at-home candids and the other half more staged portraits in a pretty location), with an album pairing more at-home and personality shots from the present with those from the past. More of the same, sure, but that way we’ll be able to catalog all of these new photos into albums just as Mom always has, while also enjoying the old images, too.

Now that you’ve gotten a behind-the-scenes look at our album creation process, click play on that top video to see how it all came together.