In my posts a couple of months back about album marketing I suggested that you need an entry-level price that doesn't scare people. That prompted Darlene to tell a good story... "If a bride has a Mercedes budget and your prices start at Ford, she won't even come look at you. I've seen that in action with some of my clients. "One guy from a rust-belt town was charging $1500-3000. He told me, 'I can't sell your albums – they're too expensive and I can't get $5000 for a wedding round here'. "I told him he'd be surprised to learn, then, that one of his competitors (20 minutes away) was using To View More >>

Meet one of Justine Ungaro's brand new client albums - a Mint green Queensberry Duo she shot and designed for clients Kristan and Steve. Justine met Steve while scouting for bands for her own wedding. He played in the band she eventually hired, and he booked her as his and Kristan's wedding photographer. Justine says, "We each had a real vested interest in the overall success of each other's weddings. It's been a pretty special relationship ever since." Kristan and Steve married on 30 May 2009 and when their album arrived, wrote to Justine to say... "We totally love this album! The photos look To View More >>

I'm going to drop two shoes in this post. First shoe: Some time ago Johannes wrote a post he called Crikey ("that's a lot of money for an album"). It made me feel a little fidgety. I thought, we care too much about the quality of our products and services to compromise them, and maybe that's a problem. Clients often say they love what we do, but can we do it cheaper? Sometimes we try. We go about looking at how we could adapt a product, system or idea … but we don't do cheap well. We're as proud of our work as you are of yours, and compromising feels like we're shooting for the moon with an To View More >>

I don't like long posts, and I'm always at Ian and Nigel to keep 'em brief so I apologize. This recent post prompted Ken to comment and me to respond with this, my longest ever... Ken asked whether our industry's main challenge wasn't "crap photography" but competitors with stupid pricing, for example, "2 photographers, hi-res images and Queensberry with 60 images for £1500." Ken suggested that people like that shouldn't last in business but they keep coming back... So I presume that if in fact they're surviving, they're probably a high volume, low margin outfit - possibly with healthy post-event To View More >>

My interview with Rod Ellmore talked about how the close partnership between photographers and vendors in the '70s and '80s helped build some great careers, but it wasn't all positive. One disadvantage was that marketing gimmicks picked up at seminars organised by the vendors propagated like viruses! Like this one - the notorious "couple in the brandy glass". Pam brought us a picture (left) from her brother Martin's 80s wedding to Simone (thanks for sharing!). And I found proof that tacky ideas live on in Photoshop. Now you know I'm a snob – but not as much as I used to be: There's nothing wrong To View More >>

Version 1.47, builds on changes introduced in v1.46. Our main focus was on Queensberry's new press books, including fixes to the new workflow, many of them "behind the scenes" from the user point of view. We know we have a way to go with this and the developers are continuing to work on cover design issues in particular. Having said that we've introduced three new features to speed up your album design. They're still a bit "v1.0", but we wrote them in consultation with Queensberry's design team, who live and die by productivity, and we wanted to get them to you early so you could take a look and To View More >>

The purpose of our recent survey was to get a better picture of how you're using the software, and the features most important to you. It turns out you use Photojunction to design albums for almost a hundred album suppliers that we don't even offer resources for - no wonder a third of you "always" use Remix DIY! It's also clear that unless you're one of Queensberry's clients you're most likely using PJ primarily to design and export page layouts. That's not so surprising. Getting past "page design" requires a lot of input from vendors, and unfortunately they're much less engaged with PJ than their To View More >>

My clients would not dream of paying me $4000 for an empty photo album. Nor would they pay that for a book with somebody else’s photographs in it. They wouldn’t pay me that much even if I supplied them the files to print the images themselves. My clients would pay me $5000 for a book that told a story about themselves that was beautiful, personal, and emotional. The tooth fairy only pays up on the real thing. What is a sample album? Sample albums have several jobs. The main one is to set up an expectation. An expectation of quality, style, and professionalism. Our sample album(s) are what To View More >>

The new final of Photojunction will be out in a few days and it has a new feature that may affect you. First, to set the scene, our matted albums were designed to be constructed mainly of "standard" (single) sides, as opposed to panoramas. But lately we've noticed that one or two of our clients are designing with heaps of panoramas, more than the book can accommodate. This puts more thickness into the spine of the book than it's designed for, and so stresses it in various ways. For the last year or so our goal has been to make PJ smart enough to stop people from designing an album that we can't To View More >>

More from Mark Miller: Press books - I agree with everything you say. At Focus I had a great conversation with Danny who suggested that 'everyone' did digital, ie it was commonplace with suppliers but that Duos were the really unique albums. I agree. Aren't QBY digital albums really just a fancier, more expensive press-book? Again, that's not meant to be insulting, I'm just trying to add to the conversation. FWIW, I've stopped offering digital albums (other than mini copies) and will move to a Duo only offering for next season. No offence taken. I love our digital albums, and so do many of our To View More >>