Concentrate

Sometimes clients ask for advice - the most frequent topics are creating slideshows and assembling photo albums. I had their questions in mind when last weekend we vistited friends (that's not the Royal we, they're more my wife's friends so we went together).

"Would you like to see our photoalbums?" Genuinely I could say yes, and two Bonusprints albums were pulled off the coffee table. I started to flick through the images. Oh dear.

First impression, this is boring. Each page had been crammed with photos, consequently each one was the same size and very square. Now square is hard to compose for, and that did nothing for the images.

Second, this is a mess. What they'd done, and I can see it seemed like a good idea at the time, was get bound all the photos they'd taken this summer. They'd taken a trip to St Petersburg, there was some family celebration, a weekend away in Lille, and a relative held a retirement party. And more.

My brain was in overload, it was just image after image, we jumped from one location to another, from a Russian square to a marquee in Reading. I quickly lost the thread of what was going on. OK, it's easy to criticise but how would I have done it better.

Just concentrate - on one subject. Our Trip to Imperial Russia would have made a great album, and the viewer would experience the warm glow of knowing each page helps you explore a brilliant holiday. They had enough shots to fill an album and I suspect if you go to St petersburg you'll be hard pressed to take a bad photo. Then selectively invest in a few enlarged images. Go on, throw caution to the wind and have a single image on one page. That would have made a big impact.

What of the second album? I'd say the same should apply. Have one album, albeit smaller, for the events they'd taken shots. I would have skipped old Fred's retirement bash, but a few snaps of their kids over the summer would have been worth flicking through.

Next time I open iPhoto to compose a photoalbum I'm going to go for the event, the whole event, nothing but the event.