From 97 To 52

AstroBanana went back to My Bridal Room today for Round 2 of the photo selection process. Somehow, they ended up taking much more time than they did during the first round - 3.5 hours versus 2 hours!

They systematically went through all the 97 photos shortlisted in the first round and managed to whittle them down by 45 percent to 53 photos. From that point onwards, it became very difficult to weed out any more photos. The highly disciplined Astro Girl wanted to reduce the total number of photos to 33. Eric Banana was simply holding on to all 53. In the end, they cut another nine photos to bring the tally down to 44. Astro Girl gave up the 8R table-top photo and the 24 pieces of 4" x 5" photos that were part of the original package to exchange for two additional photos. That worked out to a top-up of 44 - 33 - 2 = 9 photos. That would have cost them $9x. Abbie tried to persuade them to add more photos - a top-up of 12 photos (for a total of 47 photos) would have cost them $12y, which is only $120 more than $9x. Furthermore, Abbie was willing to round the figure down to $(12y -40). Eventually, she convinced them to increase the total top-up amount to $18z (which is $160 more than $12y) and offered them another five more photos (for a total of 52 photos) plus the re-inclusion of the 8R table-top photo. By then, AstroBanana were already very tired. Eric Banana was fairly okay with the final top-up figure as it was two to three times lower than his mental budget. As for Astro Girl, *hmmm* she was last spotted looking for other corners to cut :|

So the question is - "What are the values of x, y and z?" :P

The design and layout for the photo album will take about 1.5 months. AstroBanana have arranged to review the design and layout on 5 September 2009. Hope the end-product will turn out to be nice :)