Photography quickly rose to the top of my list of important things when we began planning. I knew I wanted something special, but I didn't know exactly what. Unless you are used to working with photographers on a pretty regular basis, most of us just know what we like when we see it. When I stumbled upon Luke's work, I just knew he was the one. It was sort of like falling in love at first sight.
Then you find the price for your dream. And it's usually higher than you hoped for.
To fit the constraints of budget, the only way to make my make my 2-shooter, 8-hour fantasy happen was to cut out the album option. My high-quality images would land in my lap on 2 discs, about 8GB worth of our gorgeous day. Luke also included web-ready images, which were much smaller and included his watermark. This made recaping our wedding pretty easy breezy, but now it's all up to me to figure out how to present my photos outside of the internet.
Uploading the high-res images to photobook sites became frustrating when I learned that most hosts don't allow images over 10 MB-- almost all of my images are over 20 MB. That's huge. Luckily I was able to resize in Adobe Fireworks, but silly me then resized almost 100 images a little too small. *facepalm* So frustrating!
I tried uploading my resized photos to Picasa to use them inside of Blurb, but then Picasa-- without rhyme or reason-- continued to act up and reject my photos, causing me to almost throw my computer across the room. So I did what any good Apple user does-- I turned to iPhoto to make my album.
Omigod, ya'll, it was so easy! There was no uploading and crossing my fingers it would work. I just dragged and dropped and changed layouts at will and iPhoto let me know if the photo size was too small to print well. The full-page photos are the only ones I used the super high-res images for. The hardest part was choosing which photos to include and trying to restrain myself from hitting the "new page" button too many times. I will report back on the quality when I see the finished product.
Photography editing is no walk in the park, even if you do have appropriate software. It takes a lot of patience and time and if you are short on both, think about adding the album options to your photography package. While at the time you think you will be able to work that out yourself, sometimes it's best left to the professionals!
Have you made an Apple photobook? How did it turn out for you?
