One’s wedding day should be a beautiful, everlasting memory that will stand the test of time. It should be a fairytale day for the bride and provide memories for the years to come. However, a couple was faced with a unique challenge when attempting to plan one such fairytale day for the blind bride. Shorting before meeting Rod, her future husband to be, Steph lost her eyesight. Although the couple fell in love and decided to get married, the bride hesitated when it came to planning the big day. Associated with sorrow at her not being able to see the decor or even herself as a bride, both Steph and Rod agonized over what to do.
Enter James Day, a Sidney photographer. Working together with the couple, Day would go on to design a tactile experience unlike any ever created before. Day’s efforts at capturing the couple’s special day would immortalize it in a way that the couple and their family will remember for years to come. Rather than simply taking photos of the couple, although the photos the professional photographer would go on to take were indeed stunning, Day decided to work with the senses available to the bride: touch, smell, and sound.
What resulted from Day’s efforts was a truly one-of-a kind experience for the couple. Working with them on the day of the wedding, Day made sure to create various sensations associated with different points of the wedding day and different objects. For example, if the bride were to hear The Wedding March further down the line, she would easily recall walking down the aisle and all of the emotions she experienced while doing so.
However, Day took things a step further. He infused various fabrics and objects around the bride with specific smells. These smells in turn would allow the bride to associate them with her wedding day further down the line. While the bride was given an amazing tactile experience on the day of her wedding, the photo album Day would go on to create for the couple would prove to be uniquely special. The beautiful wedding photos placed in the couple’s photo album are heat activated. One they are activated, the bride is able to “read” them utilizing a technique similar to Braille.
The photos placed in the photo album mimic the feelings and textures of the various cloths and fabrics the bride touched the day of her wedding, bringing her right back to that day. They are infused with the scents the bride smelled on her wedding day, and the book interactively plays music according to each scene. By reliving the exact physical sensations, smells, and sounds of each scene, the bride is effectively transported back to her wedding day. Although she will likely never see the photos the photographer took with her own eyes, she was given the gift of feeling, hearing, and smelling her wedding day in a way that is truly priceless.
