Introducting Engagement Guest Books

I’ve been offering engagement guest books for a while now and they’re catching on with weddings in here Pittsburgh. Engagement guest books are a great use for the photography from your engagement session and they actually make the guest book something that you’re naturally drawn to years after your wedding. It’s like a mini-album of sorts. We had a standard guest book at our wedding and I honestly can’t say where it is now, but if it had photos of me and Brad from our engagement, I’d absolutely treasure it and keep it close by!

So here is the latest engagement guest book I designed for Corey and Jeff’s session earlier this month. We went to Raccoon Creek State Park and they had a sweet date theme, complete with props: a picnic basket and blanket, a camera, and a guitar! I love their creativity and when clients wants to go for a theme, I will jump right in!

This is the first page. I’m still waiting on the actual book to be delivered, but I figured I’d show the actual page design in the meantime.

The pages are hinged so that they lay flat when the book is open. And that’s a good thing because guest books are typically displayed open so that guests can easily sign it.

The pages alternate so that images are on the front and back of one page and then the next page is left blank for guests to sign.

I have my watermark on these images, but there is no watermark on the actual pages.

Corey and Jeff picked the images to be included in their book from the web gallery that I created for their session. They also get a disc of their edited images as part of the engagement session. After they let me know their selects, I retouched the edited images and designed the book.

I’ve done some sessions at Raccoon Creek before, but I decided to head out a little earlier and scout around to see if I could find anything new and not far from the park was this lovely hillside.

One of the reasons I’ve been drawn to this park is that the lake at North Park in Pittsburgh is currently being drained. And the park just doesn’t have the same appeal without the lake. So clients who want to be photographed by water needed an alternative. Raccoon Creek State park is only a 30-minute drive from Pittsburgh, so it’s a great option. And there’s a dock that’s just big enough for me, my light and a couple if they sit at the very end of it. My wide angle lens makes it look bigger than it really is.

Corey and Jeff are getting married in southern West Virginia in October. They already had a photographer booked when they contacted me about an engagement session in Pittsburgh. If they hadn’t I would definitely have traveled to photograph their wedding. They are so much fun to work with!

The design for this book is one of my newer approaches to albums. The backgrounds are actual images of wallpaper that I’ve altered by neutralizing the color and adding some texture. I like them because they’re not too contrasty so they don’t take away from the photography, but they tie the book together with a consistent look. I can customize the backgrounds for each wedding or engagement session and I think they’re fitting as if the photos were framed and hanging on a wall.

I’m a bit of a realist in my approach to photography and design. I don’t want to go over the top with a trendy look and have my work feel overly dated in a decade. This is a fine line and I’m always happy to adjust my approach depending on my clients’ preferences.

I love switching back and forth between natural light and off-camera flash. Sometimes my approach with flash is subtle and sometimes it is more dramatic.

Well, that wraps up the design for Corey and Jeff’s engagement guest book. It’s a 20-page book and can fit 280 signatures. I designed it so that it could be used for a small or large wedding. There are no numbers on the lines so that guests at a smaller wedding can use several lines to write a short message.