George's birthday

New photographs and text

A fifth birthday party celebration. I attended the party, and spent a very enjoyable two hours following the children around the hall with my zoom lens; as I was a stranger to most of them, they paid me no attention at all!

I took around 200 digital photographs. It took a further 3 hours to go through them all, deleting any of inferior quality, cropping and enhancing as required, and to design the book. In the end, around 150 photographs were used in the book.

I then asked Mum to send me a few details about the child: his favourite things, the names of the friends who attended the party, the gifts he received, and also a copy of the story that Mum had written to be used during a game. All these were included.

This was the budget:

• 2 hours' photography @ £25 per hour = £50
• 3 hours to edit photographs and design book = £75
• Cost of book (10" x 8", 40 pages, hardback with dustjacket) = £15.95
• Economy postage (approx. 2 weeks delivery) = £3.44
• Charity donation = £2
• Total = £146.39

Thank you for my wonderful book. This was George's fifth birthday, but his first 'proper' party with school friends and it's so lovely to have a permanent reminder of it. It was also nice to not have to bother about taking pictures myself on the day - as you can imagine, there was plenty of other stuff to occupy me! The other mums are all delighted with the images of their children too. A super memento.

Rachel, Norfolk