Lets start a photo book company!
That was the crazy idea we had 10 years, 7 months and 6 days ago, when Geoff and I sat awe-inspired on the edge of Vermilion Lakes, Banff, Canada. Me with wine in hand watching the sun set, Geoff madly trying to catch the awe-inspiring moment on our beloved Sony 3 mega pixels digital camera.
Imagine the Leyland Brothers campervan with a Tardis like interior, decked out by Steve Jobs, and that was what we were traveling in. The most ridiculously wired up motor home on the west coast. Nightly, 60MB of photos chugged from our camera to a huge external hard drive via a SCSI lead. Ah, the heady days of slow technology!
I tell you this because just like thousands before us, and maybe just like you, we were contemplating how one can travel and make money at the same time! We didn’t crack the magic code but we did combine our expertise in media production and software development, with our love of photography and design, to create a company that let’s us now enjoy our annual holiday snaps in a printed book.
There are so many great stories we hear about how the books we print came to be, so I thought it only right to share the story behind the very first Momento photo book with you – Canada 2002 – painstakingly created using Photoshop and Word! Ouch.
We were insatiable with our first digital camera. We even created themes for our daily photo shoots that included Hunting For Sasquatch, The Extreme Adventures Of Psedric The Dinosaur and Geoff’s infamous Art In Absentia series, inspired (or rather uninspired) by the dull Torontonian architecture which meant we could only take photos without looking through the viewfinder or screen.
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Although we were mad for digital photography we felt 6×4" photo prints just didn’t cut it anymore. Our photos deserved better! Or at least we thought so at the time. They’d made phenomenal advances in camera technology but why not photo print technology? We decided to tackle that issue ourselves and … Momento was born.
By joining forces with another great geek and past colleague, James, we set about creating a business that we would want to work in, that created products we would want to buy. Quality staff, quality software, quality service and quality materials were essential if we were to make it possible for anyone to design and print a beautifully bound book of their photos that they and their family could treasure for a long time.
We genuinely use the products we create as you will see in the books and calendars that track our progress from a good idea to a busy and rewarding business. So many people were a part of making Momento a reality – staff, customers and supporters – a big thanks to you all!