On June 10 of this year, my Rose Ellen (not Photo Reporter’s managing editor) and I celebrated the 50th anniversary of our marriage. That same 50 years represents the most dynamic changes that the photographic industry has experienced.
As a way of highlighting that dramatic change, I took our original black-and-white wedding album, which had been dry mounted into the form of a book, and created the material for a digital photo book. It took some work, but the results were amazing.
To start with, I set up an old copy stand—some may be sitting in the back room of current photo businesses (a few old-timers will remember how they used them)—and used my Olympus SLR. Some of the black-and-white prints were 16×20-inch photo prints that had cracked and showed some damage from the years. Photoshop made retouching easy.
Rather than create the digital book myself, I sent it to the designers at Smile Books, the USA branch of CEWE Color in Germany, one of the oldest and largest photo book publishers. A week later, I had proof pages to look at on my computer—and they were magnificent.
The digital and the original 1961 wedding books were both shown as part of our anniversary celebration in Rochester, New York. The original book sat side by side with the new electronic photo book, and to my surprise, almost every guest picked up the new book and went through it page by page. They loved the 2011 version.
Today, many wedding couples receive digital books as part of their wedding package, but here’s an opportunity for photo dealers to copy old wedding albums for special occasions or even for distribution to family members, and create digital versions that multiple family members can order. One thing you should remember: check for the copyright status on the original photos.
This project inspired me to add a new Epson scanner to my home office that will allow me to not only scan or copy photos but also scan filmstrips and slides. There are now many thousands of images in my files, beyond those wedding photos, that can make wonderful digital books.
Creating my new wedding photo book was an exciting project and one that brought a lot of happy memories to family and friends. And after the celebration, we were in store for an even bigger digital book surprise: our friends Phyllis and Keith Hackleman had taken digital photos both at the church renewal ceremony and the celebration that followed, and a couple of weeks after our anniversary day, they presented us with a spectacular digital book of photos and journaling about our events. Keith used available software to create the beautiful photo book design, making it a perfect ending to a very special time—a digital ending.
