Whenever I’m consulting my couples about their wedding photography, I always talk about the plan in terms of telling this chapter of their love story. While I may not have been there for their early chapters, I get to capture this exciting and beautiful installment of their saga. And what’s a storybook without a little bit of text?

By far, my favorite part of creating Nicole and Chris’s heirloom album was interweaving each line of their vows throughout the book. Design-wise, adding text to a photo album presents its own challenges; namely, how to make it readable without distracting from the photos. I shoot each wedding with the album in mind, using compositional elements like leading lines or shallow depth of field to create negative space perfect for overlaying words. Typically, if I’m adding just a few verses or quotations in an album, I can choose which already-designed (by me, in a different program) pages to pair the text with based on the blurb’s shaping. With Nicole and Chris’s I needed to keep their vows in the order they wrote them, and somehow as I was creating the photo layouts for each page, the text seemingly just fit right in perfectly. A reflection of how easily Nicole and Chris work together as well, I think.

Sometimes I’ve added the entirety of someone’s vows onto one page - particularly paired with a ceremony photo and especially if they’d like a lot of text in their book. However, with this one I wanted to try something new. I envisioned Nicole and Chris sitting down to look through their album for the hundredth time, decades later, showing their grandchildren or grandpuppies this piece of their lovestory. I imaged them reliving all the joy, excitement and tenderness captured visually in their photos, narrated from cover to cover with their promises to each other, acting as a voiceover were this a highlight reel. This may now be my very favorite way to incorporate words into a wedding album.

The other really interesting part of creating these albums is seeing what is most important to each couple visually. As I let them choose which images they’d like to put in their album, I get to see all of their favorites, I get to see what moments mattered most. Usually these match up pretty closely with my own list. Nicole and Chris’s was no exception because almost every single candid image was of laugher (my very favorite thing to photography!)

From having numerous planning conversations, getting up close and personal during the engagement shoot and even more so on the wedding day, delivering the photos and planning the album, I get to know each couple pretty intimately throughout this whole wedding photography process. So, by the time I delivered Nicole and Chris’s album, I felt like I was sending a gift to friends. But getting to tell a beautiful love story like this one, getting to use all of my photography and design talents to showcase a special relationship like theirs, is a gift for me, too.