Why are Wedding Albums so expensive?
The modern wedding album
Today's modern wedding albums are digitally designed, as opposed to the traditional matted albums. The new albums are also known as flush-mount because each page is mounted onto a leaf of the album, and then trimmed so that the three edges from the spine are all flushed or "full bleed" in printer's terms. By having the photographic paper cover the entire surface of the page, album designs take advantage of the real estate, resulting in creative, artistic and innovative layouts that elicit the ooh's and the ahhh's. As a final note, these albums are also called "magazine-style", probably due to the layouts resembling the spreads of your favorite fashion rag.
What you pay for
When it comes to the album, there are several things to consider:
One is the actual cost of making the prints and having the album manufacturer do a "one-off", that is, a manufacturing run of 1 copy. As you can well imagine, if someone builds you a custom car, or a piece of custom furniture, it's going to cost more because unlike a mass-produced item like a Harry Potter novel, the expenses for the manufacturer's costs cannot be spread over the entire run.
Next, there is the matter of the album design itself. Designing a wedding album takes many, many hours, as well as expertise in post-processing software. Another factor is that the professional photographer has a vision of what the album should look like, in order to tell the story of your wedding day and to be visually creative and enticing. In the end, it is in the best interest of the professional wedding photographer to produce an outstanding wedding album as that is a key marketing tool. Thus, the client gets an album to be proud of, and she will show it off to her friends, some of whom may be getting married, etc.
Convenience. This is probably something not many clients think of if she thinks the album is "expensive". Clients of Dave Wong Photography have mentioned how many friends who do not order an album package -- thinking they will design and create the albums themselves to save a few dollars -- wind up not doing anything with their digital negatives. Instead the images sit on their hard drives, and in a drawer somewhere because "life gets in the way".
Conclusion
In the end, when you factor in all the pieces to the puzzle, a quality wedding album costing $1500 is not unreasonable.
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