Ends of the earth

Here's a wedding from the ends of the earth, where your albums come from. Louise and Tom were married before 250 guests at the First Church, Dunedin New Zealand, on 24th February 2007.

The dress was made by Louise Anderson of Christchurch (no relation!) with fabric brought back by the bride from a shopping trip in Italy. With that exception the groom was an equal opportunity wedding planner.

The wedding was photographed by New Zealand Wedding Photographer of the Year Jo Grams, of Moda Fotografica. It was an "exhausting" 12 hour shoot, with just one photographer, and ended at 11.30pm.

Jo says she "loved photographing the wedding". The couple chose a "generous" 15x12 black leather digital-paged album which was printed and bound at Queensberry. "I loved it so much I got one for the studio display."

The couple are expecting their first child at the end of June.



Click here to view Louise and Tom's album.

Click here for Jo's and husband Johanne's profile.

Print-Responsibility

In many labs these days the only people who look at your prints are the Dispatch team. Strange as it seems, that makes sense – it's your files they’re printing, and something has to give if you want low prices.

But it doesn’t make sense at Queensberry. We critique everything we print, including Print-Ready. The difference is we see the image files with Full Colour Service (because it’s our job to colour correct them) whereas we don’t see Print-Ready work until it’s printed.

But why review Print-Ready work at all? Print-Ready means you edit your images yourself, and we don’t modify them. We just print what we’re given, right?

It’s not that simple.

We can’t afford to put a client's prints into an expensive album, ship it to them and then have a debate about who’s to blame for the printing.

It’s not just about print quality either. We need to check for other things that can spoil an album, such as alignment, cropping and panorama problems. Otherwise we risk converting a few wasted prints into a major expense, with neither party wanting to wear the cost.

All the issues I’ve mentioned are the photographer’s responsibility under Print-Ready, which is why we charge for any reprints necessary to fix them. (To save on cash and frustration, see our own checklist.)

But equally important, we have our own standards to maintain. People are paying for the very best when they choose a Queensberry album. And many of our staff have spent a lifetime in this industry and deservedly hold their heads high. What should we do if they come to us and ask, “Is this OK to put in one of our albums?” It happens.

That said, there's no implicit "We're right and they're wrong" here. You might not like our colour correction policy, for example, or the characteristics of our equipment, and that's OK. There’s no "blame" attached to differences of opinion or taste. And yes, we do get it wrong sometimes.

But in a quality-focused organisation we can’t ask staff to compromise our own standards. And after all, their goal is the best possible outcome for your clients.

Cheers, Ian

Claridges... twice

It was an unusual celebration indeed when Hiro Sekine and Vino Mahalingam married on 14th October 2007 at Claridge's, one of London's most celebrated and glamorous hotels. Vino was dressed in black tie and Hiro in her traditional Kimono. Bright colourful flowers were the order of the day, and traditional Japanese gifts for the guests added to the many special touches that Vino and Hiro had organised. This was a small and intimate celebration with close friends and family, and the whole day was fun and relaxed.

The event was photographed by Berkshire UK photographer Nikki Hill. The couple chose an impressive 18x12 Sand Leather Queensberry digital album featuring 180 of their favourite images.




Only 3 months later, on January 22nd 2008, Vino and Hiro's beautiful son Kasey was born. Nikki says, "We revisited their favourite London hotel when Kasey was just six weeks old for a very different style of shoot. Hiro's mother and sister were visiting from Japan, and we had another wonderful day of photography, fantastic club sandwiches and afternoon tea. Vino and Hiro now have a second 18x12 Queensberry album, featuring their wonderful new addition to the family!"

Click here to view Vino and Hiro's wedding album.

Click here to view Kasey's album.

Click here to view Nikki's profile.

Local for sure

We like to say “We’re local” wherever we do business, but this story is as local as you can get…



When we asked our regular clients to complete a survey, we promised a free album to one lucky respondent. We couldn’t believe it when the winner was a New Zealander, Liz March, from our own hometown! In fact she used to work not a mile from the Bindery. When we asked Liz to introduce herself to our readers, this is what she wrote:

“About ten years ago I was working as an art teacher at a full immersion Maori school in Glen Eden. On my way to school one morning I picked up a hitchhiker who wanted a lift to Queensberry. ‘What’s Queensberry?’ I asked. As we drove she explained.

As I was already shooting weddings in the weekends after school it was great to discover Queensberry just behind the school and get to know the staff.

I always worked late and one night after school I called in and met another late worker, Heather, who started the company.

After a while I could not keep two balls in the air at once and took the step to go full time into photography and have never looked back.

My business, now into its seventh year, has run well. I have loved the privilege of being part of people’s lives in this way.

NZIPP has provided good connections with other photographers and Queensberry makes great albums.

I have won one gold and two silver awards in the last three years in the Kodak gold wedding album awards.

I feel it is good to keep your personal creative juices running and have kept up work other than weddings, and have had several exhibitions and a publication.

It’s time for a new display album and I had been working on new designs. So this prize is much appreciated and came at the right time.

Many thanks, Queensberry.

Liz March”

Are you winning?

Food for thought... Photographers do a huge amount more now than they used to in the old days - and it's questionable whether they get paid for it.

They used to "send their work to the lab", now they ARE the lab.

Colour management and colour correction used to be the lab's problem, now they're the photographer's.

My thought for the day – you can't afford cheap printing for two reasons:

- YOU do all the work - that's why it's cheap.

- BECAUSE you do all the work you can't do other, more profitable stuff (or just go home earlier in the evenings).

Truth to tell, many photographers would also get a better result if they didn't touch their files, just left the work to the lab. Think of it, higher quality in less time for the small price of a higher lab bill.

Don't tell your competitors, but that's the point of Queensberry's Full Colour Service. To tweak the old Pantene ad, it won't work for everyone but it does work.

If your images could speak

Bear with me for a minute while I get opinionated – I know plenty will disagree with me ;-)

I happened across a forum post recently. Someone asked if a certain prominent photographer's winning print at a certain prominent convention was so close to the edge that it had fallen off!

After checking it out I thought the comment was a bit tough, but I could see the point. And the prominent guy wasn't alone – all the winning images were photoshopped within an inch of their lives. But the most striking thing? How different those images were to so much of what we see and admire in our Bindery.

It's incredible how much some photographers expect of themselves today that was impossible a few years ago.

It's a few years since naturalism and photojournalism were the buzzwords du jour. Maybe it's time for the pendulum to swing again – and maybe save you a ton of time.

Two questions worth thinking about: Are your clients paying for your Photoshop efforts? And could your images speak for themselves?

Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be. That's been good advice since the dawn of desktop computers.

Cheers, Ian

“Yay for Remix!”

We reckon it's time to upgrade to PJ Remix. The guys at Team PJ haven't gone final yet, but they must be getting close.

Talia from our design department loves it: "Yay for Remix! I've been doing a heap of digital album exports lately and I use a lot of non standard sizes in digital albums. Using Remix I don't need to make any adjustments to the alignment in Photoshop because PJ is now spot on! So much time being saved!"

Talia had been holding off because the QuickTime movie function was "too slow", but now that's fixed there's no holding her back.

So you know, you can move from PJ Retro to Remix at any time without charge. Your version 6.23 subscription will continue until its normal expiry.

Here's some feedback from a survey PJ did in February.

Click here to download PJ Remix