You Get What You Pay For

JC Penny is running a promotion right now with their photo studios where you get free sitting fees, a free 8x10" picture and a free (low resolution) digital image just for coming in.  Their hope, I assume, is that you'll spend lots of money buying pictures from them to make up for all the things they waived.

One of the things I wanted for my birthday was to do a nice family photo shoot to get an image we could use on a Christmas card.  My thought was that we'd get a photographer to come do a family shoot and end up with precious photos of our family and the girls to put in our home.

Instead, after seeing the promotion, we decided to give jcp a shot.

I had misgivings because they're a corporation after all.  It wasn't at my home, it was a big studio.  But I expected that the photographer would take time to ask what we wanted and have creative poses for us.

I told them that we wanted to get some good family photos and some nice pictures of the girls.  We all wore our Converse shoes so I thought it would be fun to use them in some way.  We brought cute hats for the girls to wear as well.

Now, I understand that children are unreliable.  That they don't always co-operate and that they don't understand what's being asked of them.  Especially a 5-month old.  But, given what I asked for you would think that I would get ONE useable picture of both girls together.  I did not.

Don't they look thrilled??

I wish that they had had the multiple shot feature where it would have taken 3-4 shots each time the button was pushed.  This one could have been good.

I don't even know what Addy is doing here.

And here are some good ones:

This will likely be our Christmas card picture.

I cropped this from the above photo - it was the only way to get a good shot of the girls together!

I think we ordered a larger one of this size for our wall, though I feel like she framed it poorly.  There's a lot of empty space above our heads.

So now that you've seen them - here's my thoughts.  The photographer did not suggest any poses other than us standing and holding the girls and seating Reese in a basket with Addy next to her.  I suggested we sit and it was like she'd never thought of that.  I mentioned our shoes and she apparently thought I meant I wanted them cropped out (which she did anyway).  Why would we ALL wear the same shoes if I didn't want them in a picture?

All-in-all, we got what I wanted which was a nice-ish family shot plus a Christmas card photo.  Plus, grand total spent was $12 for the entire thing - sitting fees, digital copy, 2 8X10", 1 5X7", and one 10x13".

We'll try again next year.