Ventura & Santa Barbara Counties California
Will travel to your event!
Vintage-chic ~ Contemporary ~ Glamor
Journalistic ~ Classic ~ Formal or Informal
(805) 647-6808
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Prices range from $995.00
Ventura, Camarillo, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Somis, Ojai, Santa Clara, Santa Clarita, Westlake Village, greater Los Angeles area,
Southern California, Central California
This is your life
Let me tell your story
Pam James
Photographer
and Artist
Working with you inspires me to capture the emotions and tell the story of your love and your wedding day - from getting ready for the big moment, to the joy of your ceremony and the fun of your reception. I take the photos of your event with an eye to designing your fine-art wedding album. As an artist, I approach each album as a blank canvas and when I am done each album is an original work of art in itself that you will be proud to display. With an artists eye, we will select color, album shape, paper type and over all style for your book. It will be yours and yours alone.
Through 'motion posing' and carefully planned scenes, I am mentally designing your fine-art wedding album all through your wedding day. The lighting, the emotions and the settings of your images will help me tell your story as your album flows from one page to the next.
Our fine-art albums are hand-designed, and hand crafted in a 64-step patented printing and binding process. The materials in each book are top-of-the-line and our printers works are displayed in museums all over the world. The heavy card stock pages and the inks are made to last. Your wedding album will be as vibrant and beautiful on your 50th anniversary as the day you open it for the first time, keeping the story of your love fresh for generations. 95
Pam James is a nationally acclaimed award-winning artist and photographer. In Pam's words:
Some of her accomplishments include:
A brief history of photo albums
by Pam James
Photo albums and scrapbooks have been around since the first photographs were printed on paper or ragbond. The first albums in the later 1800s and early 1900s often were hand-made and contained a few photographs bits of poetry and writing, pressed flowers and other keepsakes. As photos became more readily available, leather covered albums with thick black pages became the norm. Most of us have likely seen the black adhesive photo corners that held the tiny black and white images from days gone by. Lucky for us these materials helped preserve the printed images.
The 1970s brought albums filled with sticky pages with a clear cover page that peeled back to add photos and trinkets. The gases in these books caused many photos from the 70's to degrade, often to the point of disintegration. The inks and papers used to print photos at that time were not as stable as they are today, often fading to a sepia-like aged color. The combination that type of album and inferior inks and papers has destroyed a lot of photographic history. Most photos can't be removed to safer storage because they have bonded to the sticky base page.
By this time awareness of photo safety began to be addressed. Inks and papers improved and album materials that interact with papers and inks were replaced by photo-safe materials. One of the next innovations was vinyl-bound spiral albums with individual sleeves that photos are inserted into, with a small space at the side to write identifying information. These are still readily available with beautiful covers.
In the late 80's decorative scrapbooks became all the rage, starting with the Creative Memories system that stressed photo safety and the preservation of the stories of each family. A home-based party business, they started the scrap booking craze. Weddings, parties, and just day to day life are chronicled in hundreds of thousands of pages all over the world. Journaling, descriptive writing about an event or your feelings about that event, became a huge component of scrapbooks, enhancing the story photographs tell and transforming scrapbooks to family history. Scrapbook Magazines filled craft store racks and the industry took off, becoming for a time, the number one hobby in the country. Archival concerns became a huge part of the process. Scrapbook artists want their creations to last for generations. Papers, embellishments and albums began to focus on using materials that would preserve the precious photographs and stories in the albums.
The advent of digital photography changed everything. Suddenly photographs were easy to take in large numbers and selective printing made it easy to plan scrapbook pages of everything from the most formal wedding to kids savoring melting Popsicles on a summer day. Everything about life can be recorded in albums and scrapbooks.
It was only natural that the next innovation would be using advancing computer technology. Enter digitally created photo books. One of the first digital photo books available to consumers was the Kodak Photo book, followed by Shutterfly, Picabo, MyPublisher, AdoramaPix and many many others. These companies turned the average photographer into an amateur graphic designer. Over time these companies have evolved to provide increasing control of page layouts, papers, and digital embellishments. In a few hours a beautiful book of any series of images can be created. No longer are photos languishing in the "to be scrap booked" file. A trip taken a week ago can become a travel book within hours of editing the images. When printed and bound, digital albums are impressive keepsake books.
Professional photographers often use lay-flat fine-art books, the pinnacle of the digital book art form. I have been fortunate to discover a company dedicated to doing everything possible to help me as your photographer to be successful in creating museum quality, fine art albums for my clients. Thick, sturdy pages of card stock are imprinted with your images, text and embellishments to create one of a kind coffee table style books for our customers. These high-end books are ideal for milestone events from new baby portraits, outdoor family photo shoots, engagements and weddings.
I am very lucky to have at least one example of all these forms of memory keeping from the black paged albums of the 40's and 50's, sticky pages (at least the ones I haven't been able to retrieve my photos from), early Creative Memory Albums, later decorative scrapbooks, digital books from many companies and lastly the beautiful lay-flat fine-art books used for my wedding clients. Your wedding is your history, trust me to help you create an heirloom to enjoy again and again!
Flow-motion Photography
Flow-motion photography is the art of the photographer taking multiple pictures with the final placement in the album in mind. In most photo albums, there is one picture and then there is another - usually formally posed. We believe that even if we take a shot that is set up by us, that as you leave the pose and move to the next or even the next location, that taking shots of you getting there - walking, talking, laughing - kind of reminds you of the flow of a video and gets the real "you" without you looking into the camera.
