This guest post is by Dr. Dhiraj Kacker, CEO and co-founder of Canvera, an online digital photography company based in Bangalore, India. Dhiraj has numerous patents and publications to his name in the field of Digital Imaging. Dhiraj can be found online on twitter, his company blog or his personal blog.

With the advent of digital photography and the simultaneous rise of the Internet the entire photography landscape has been revamped in the last decade. This audience knows these changes quite well so I won’t dwell on all of them but rather I’ll focus my post on the technology and craft that goes behind a product that was spawned by this revolution: Photo Books.

I don’t know how many people actually sit back and think about it but it is quite remarkable that today we can actually get a single copy of a book printed at a reasonable price and turned around fairly fast. In the traditional book publishing world the economics just would not make sense unless there were at least say a 1000 copies of a book to be printed. There are many services that provide the ability to print one-off books:

a) Consumer grade photo books by companies such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodakgallery

b) Self publishing service providers such as Blurb, Amazon etc. that focus on generic publishing not just photo content

c) High-end photobook and album manufacturers such as Graphistudio, Asuka, Queensberry etc. that provide a much richer variety in covers, papers, finishing and other customizations. These are the favorites with professional photographers because they best showcase the work of a pro.

Canvera falls in the last category and we have slowly but surely added more and more options as we engaged with more photographers and understood their needs. There is however a constant tension between how many options we can offer versus producing a high quality output and keeping fast turnaround times. What makes this difficult is that there are many different pieces that have to come together in an exact sequence without requiring any one person or set of people to keep track.

Take for example a flush mount book with a custom cover and a personalized box with pictures. The inside of the book is printed on a silver halide machine and bound. The cover and the box wrap are printed on a wide-format printer (in Canvera’s case). The cover goes for separate finishing and then through barcodes is matched at a separate station with the book block and then bound together. The same happens with the custom box. Now there are complications in the process: the silver halide printer and wide-format printer have to be producing the same colors at all times, we can’t afford to have anyone trying to match colors on a book by book basis; individual sheets may have to get re-printed for a variety of reasons; QA may reject the finishing of one of the pieces and that may have to get re-done and matched back with the remaining finished pieces.

None of this is possible to do at scale without significant automation and technology. But adding options brings with it significant complexity as well. Even seemingly simple things such as adding more cover varieties, paper types or hot foil stamping fonts requires us to think through the full workflow: what equipment do we need, where will the raw materials be available on the production floor, how will quality analysis happen etc. We keep trying to push the envelope in adding choices (and at times have gotten burned!) but it is a balancing act.

At Canvera our driving philosophy behind everything we do is as follows:

a) 80% of what makes a good photo book or album is the photography! No matter how many digital photography touch-up tools have been created and how many effects one can do, the pressure on a pro to produce great pictures is as high as ever. In fact I’d argue that with an explosion in images fueled by the web and multitude of capture devices, consumers have subconsciously developed a greater appreciation of what makes a good picture.

b) Fast turnaround time matters a lot. Take the case of wedding photography: For the bride and groom 90% perfect pictures and album received within 10-15 days of the occasion are much more valuable than the absolute perfect set received 6 months after the event. At Canvera therefore, once we get an order we try to put it in the mail within 48 hrs.

c) Quality of printed products should be high and predictable. It is not good enough that the samples are great, but every single product produced every single time without requiring any special treatment should be produced at high quality.

With these driving principles, we focus more on turn-around-time and end-to-end workflow to ensure speed and quality while hopefully letting the photography do most of the talking. This does not mean that we don’t keep adding options, but we do try and think through the full implications first.

Here are things for you to consider when choosing a photo book or album company (beyond of course liking the samples):

1) What kind of front end tools (web or client based) do they provide to capture the order correctly? If there is complexity of choices in the order that the front end tools are not capturing and you are sending instructions over email/phone, chances are that mistakes will happen..

2) As the company grows, do they have processes in place to maintain their turn-around-times and quality at high volumes or are they better off as a low volume hand-made producer?

3) Do the variety of options on the books and albums lend themselves to more mistakes? Is the company ready to handle that much complexity?

4) What kind of color consistency is there in their production work flow?

As I said earlier, at Canvera we are taking the approach that first and foremost the photographs should do the talking. That’s key. And we as the photo book and album manufacturers should get out of the way by quickly turning around a high quality product with the right colors morning, evening or night, even if it means in the short term compromising a little on the variety we offer.

What do you think? How do you pick your photo book and album company? Do you agree/disagree with this thinking?

This guest blog post is written by Eric O'Connor, a Chicago wedding photographer, owner of Allori Photography and mylife-pages. Follow Eric on Twitter.

2012 will soon be here.

January is the perfect time to take a hard look at how to maximize profits in the upcoming year. These are a few recommendations that have helped me, follow all three and I know they'll work for you too.

1. What's in it for me?
2. Stay in Touch
3. Share the Love

What's In It For Me?

Your clients want information. They want to know every detail about their purchase. Give it to them! You are the expert. Share your knowledge and process with them. Whatever you do please don't wait until after the wedding to inform your client about the pre-design process. If you do they will feel cheated.  After they book with you make sure to take time or create a wedding album FAQ to walk them through the album process. This doesn't have to be complicated. Just a simple step by step from the day you shoot the wedding to the day you deliver their album. Set expectations and then deliver on them. It is important they understand you will be telling the story of their wedding day and you'll use as many pages as it takes to get it right. I always like to mention it gives them a great starting point. They can then customize the album to exactly what they want. Your clients will love this idea. Anytime they can take ownership in the process, you win!

Stay in Touch

Take a minute and think about the excitement leading up to the wedding. Your clients are excited about their wedding and then … BAM! … the wedding is over. It doesn't take long and they are back to real life. Catch your bride and groom in that first 30 days and their wedding day excitement will do the selling for you. You likely only have a 30 day window to take advantage of the wedding high. If 30 to 90 days go by and your bride hasn't seen pictures or a draft of her album it is much harder to add pages or sell additional albums. I make it a point to have everything to my brides 7 days after their wedding. I used to deliver images 30 days after the wedding and routinely life got in the way and the brides wouldn't even think about their album for a few more months. There were always a lot of album edits and very little pages added. Now, 7 days after their wedding they can view their Animoto slideshow, image gallery, and album pre-design right on their wedding website. I make sure to give my clients a deadline. We want to have the album completed and ready to print in 3 to 4 weeks. This helps give them a target to have their changes complete. Extra albums page sales have gone from a few or none to five, ten or more from every wedding.

Share the Love

Quick turnaround time is essential but I find coupling that with excitement from friends has really helped additional album page sales. A few years ago I emailed PDFs to my brides and they would leave me comments for changes. This was pretty efficient but didn't help me much when it came to advertising or extra album pages. I don't pay for ads in magazines and only have one ad online that I tested out this year and will discontinue Jan 1.  Word of mouth, SEO, social media, and over the top customer service do the job for me. The next iteration of album sharing was a slideshow posted on YouTube. I found I was getting quite a few hits and at the same time album sales started to increase. Brides started telling me their friends loved watching their wedding album movies. This was one of those common sense moments when the light goes on in your head. Friends of the bride love the album and they start telling the bride about their favorite pages. This process makes it harder and harder for the bride to remove or change pages.

Finally I arrived at the perfect solution, Share the Love! Wedding album movies on a post wedding website are essential to higher album page sales. With a favorites gallery, Animoto slideshow, and movie of the album, my brides have a constant flow of compliments from their friends about how much they love the wedding images and album pages. As you can see in the graphic the album movie in this wedding was viewed over 200 times in 6 weeks. I have been completely removed from the album page sales process. Yes, I have to take images my clients love but my brides' friends do the rest of the work for me. I do not meet with my clients to sell or add pages. These days they all add pages without sitting down with me.

Test out the three steps above. They are easy so don't cheat yourself and pick just one. Do all three. You will start to see a difference in sales. Click the image below to see how I display sample albums on post wedding websites.

Want to try a post wedding website? Your first site is FREE. Surprise one of your favorite clients with a wedding website with colors to match their wedding.

Today's guest post is by Kate Anderson of Plumeria Album Design. Kate works with professional photographers to design clean, classic albums that wow their clients while giving the photographer some much needed free time. She lives in Minneapolis, MN. Follow her on Twitter.

Imagine a scene with me for a moment. It's 25 years or so in the future (cue the Back to the Future music now); a woman is looking through boxes in her closet. She's a bit upset, her son's new fiance is looking on. Finally, the woman finds what she's looking for. It's an old iPad, an antique from 2011. The woman looks at it with a loving smile.

“These are my wedding photos from when we were married. I haven't looked at this in so many years.”

Then the smile fades. The woman realizes there is a problem. The battery is long drained from disuse, and the charging cable is no where to be found. They've moved several times since the wedding, and as usually happens, things got misplaced and lost. Amazingly, there is a dvd, with a beautiful photo of wedding rings on it. The backup copy of the photos. But with no dvd drive in her possession for a decade, the woman can't even look at those. Her wedding photos are locked away in a digital purgatory. She can't show her future daughter in law her own wedding.

If you don't offer albums to your couples, this is a very likely scenario in the future. They probably have all the best intentions to print an album, probably at Blurb or Snapfish. But for many, it will get pushed to the back burner and neglected. So it's up to you, their trusted wedding photographer, to make sure they get an album, before it's too late. Printed books never become obselete, technology does. You don't want your brides and grooms to live on their harddrive forever.

But many photographers don't offer albums, for many of the same reasons that their clients won't get around to printing one themselves after they receive their shoot and burn disk. Albums take time if they're to be done well. They have to be put together with a storyteller's eyes. The right photos have to be selected, from hundreds. However, album design doesn't always have to be a panic inducing moment. Here's a few design tips and my process, to help you out.

Don't cram the album with photos

Less is more. Remember that. I like to have only a few photos per page for most spreads, usually around 2-3 per page. This lets each photo have it's own voice. Too many photos crammed on one page gives you a sense of confusion. Your eye darts around the page quickly, rather than calmly resting on each photo for a moment and moving on to the next. Too many photos fighting for your attention all at the same time means none get the attention they deserve, and the message that the photos tell gets lost. Look at a National Geographic magazine, or fine art book; then look at a tabloid magazine. Which feels calmer to your eye? Ignore the content of the tabloid vs the National Geographic.

But with all guidelines, there are exceptions. Some spreads work better with a bit of a denser layout. Spreads of the family groupings and wedding party, or spreads of reception dancing are examples. With family groupings, having several photos per page gives the sense of family continuity. Everyone is together, and the photos are likely to be very similar in composition. That consistency is calming to the eye even when there's many of them. Reception and dancing spreads a bit of the opposite to me. I usually want those to give a sense of energy and excitement. Using a denser layout gives that feeling.

Spreads meant to show action also may get a few more photos per page; the story of the first look can't always be told in a few photos. Spreads that focus on a scene, such as the ceremony site, sometimes need a denser layout also, to show the whole scene in one spread, as if the viewer were there and could walk around to look at different things.

Don't be afraid of the dark/white space

White space is a good thing. It focuses the eye on the photo and eliminates distractions. Think about iconic, high end brands, such as Chanel, Apple or Tiffany's. Their websites and print materials have one thing in common. White space, or negative space. Then think about lower end brands. Their websites and print materials have lots of stuff, everywhere. It's distracting and cheapens the feel.

Also, it's a lot easier to design with white space than to try and fill the page with photos. It's like putting together a puzzle. If you're not afraid of the white space, you can use only the photos that are perfect for the spread, rather than having to add or subract photos to make everything fit. In this spread, having any other photos would have been distracting and taken away from the focus.

Don't fluff up the album

Remember that “less is more” bit? That applies to how long the album is. An album is perfect when nothing can be removed without losing part of the story, and nothing can be added without feeling repetitive. Each spread should have it's own theme, or portray one event. While there may be dozens of great photos of the couple after the wedding in a field, the album doesn't necessarily need all of those photos in several spreads. Pick the best 3 or 4 and create one spread that showcases the best parts of the session. This scene had lots of awesome shots, and I could have easily used several more, it was hard to choose only a few. But adding more would have taken away from the simplicity of the moment.

Do keep it timeless

Wedding albums should be timeless. Simple and clean design is the only “trend” that stands the test of time. Think of the simple black dress, or the basic charcoal gray suit. Those work now, they worked 50 years ago, and they'll probably work 50 years from now. They are simple and clean clothing items. Your album should be the simple black dress. Extra graphics, photo layering, fading, and spot coloring may look cool now, but how are they going to look on the couple's 50th wedding anniversary to their grandkids? Don't give the kids anything more to snicker at besides the clothing and decor trends.

The 5-Step Design Process

Here's what works for me.

1) The first step for me is to download the photos and set up the folders for each album in a client's folder. Here's what my layout looks like:

2) I sort through the photos and make copies of the album selections. Each spread gets it's own folder with a theme/title, and the copied album selections are dropped in. I tag selections in red in Bridge so I don't duplicate, and the main photos of each spread get a star rating.

3) I use InDesign with the AlbumFlow script to design albums. You can also use Photoshop, and I've heard only good things about Fundy's Album Builder [aff] to speed things up. The debate of InDesign vs Photoshop is for another discussion. It's similar to Ford vs Chevy, Canon vs Nikon; they all get the job done in the end, one way or another.

4) Now I go through the finished design to eliminate any problems. I make sure the bleeds and margins are correct, that full bleed photos will be just that, and that all other photos are within the safety zone. I make sure all the photos line up and spacing is consistent. I double check that no one's head or an important detail is going to get trimmed off.

5) Last, the finished design is exported as a PDF using guidelines from AlbumFlow, to create the highest quality print. I then use Photoshop to create JPEGs from the PDF using ImageBrander from FundySOS [aff]. It's a super helpful plugin for easily watermarking and creating multiple sizes and resolutions. I can make full size JPEGs for the album company and smaller ones for the blog, all in one shot.

This isn't the first time we have addressed album design on Tiffinbox. Justine Ungaro talked about it in this post. My question for you is this – are you still stressing out about your album designs? Or, are you blissfully adding images to your pages willy-nilly and hoping that your clients don't notice. Trust me, clients are getting savvier and do know good design from bad. So, what are you going to do? You can hone your skills (if you have time) or you can farm the task out. What would you do? Tell me/us down below. It's not an easy decision. I do know that.

Ever wanted to custom design a wedding or portrait album but didn't know how to go about it using Photoshop?

Well, here comes Fundy's Album Builder to the rescue. It's fast, easy and intuitive. But best of all, you aren't stuck using templates that can “date” an album. Now, there isn't anything wrong at all about using the free templates or those you find online for a fee. But if you are looking to keep your album designs fresh and truly unique, you should consider Fundy's Album Builder.

In the video tutorial below, Andrew Funderburg (aka. The Fundy) shows us how he used some of my images from Veena and James' Wedding in Morristown, New Jersey, to build a few pages very quickly. Of course, with Fundy having designed and used this program multiple times, the buttons and the options all seem natural to him. That will come in good time for you as well and you'll be amazed at how instinctively you will approach your layouts.

As Fundy says at the beginning of the video, I have known him for some time. He is a dynamic, energetic and passionate entrepreneur who is very interested in helping photographers. As one himself, he and his business partner Kevin Focht have taken the industry by storm with their frequent webinars and YouTube tutorials like the one you see above. The products that Fundy has developed continues to evolve thanks to input from their users – i.e. people like you. So, don't feel shy about sending Fundy a note with your suggestions.

If you have any questions or comments, do post them below. If you have used FAB, tell us what your experience has been like or even drop a link to one of your album designs. We would love to take a look!

As regular subscribers to Tiffinbox or new visitors, I have a special offer from Fundy for you. Take 15% off the price of Fundy's Album Builder, when you use the following code: “Seshu”

Other programs you may be interested in as well are Album Proofer and Batch-o-licious, also from Fundy. If you want to save $125, you've gotta check out the Total Studio Pack, which includes a slew of other neat programs that Fundy has created for the photography community.