Spending money on professional baby portraits
I have seven nieces back in Ohio and their mothers were all religious about documenting their young lives through professional photographs. You know those ‘œWatch Me Grow’ packages that parents purchase through Olan Mills or JCPenney. Apparently, everyone spends money on this in the Midwest and then they’re used as décor items. Believe you me; there are a lot of portraits on those walls. Enough to make me feel like we’re jilting our parental responsibility by not having Sam sit for at least one professional photography session during his first year.
We did get sucked into the ‘œprofessional’ photos at the hospital the day after Sam’s birth, but since then we’ve been more of the do-it-yourself type mommies when it comes to pictures. Jeanine has been diligent about making sure we capture a new grouping each month. Still, I wonder if it’s worth the expense to bring in the professional.
When you look at various studio web sites, most suggest portraits at 3, 6, 9, 12, and 18 months. My siblings obviously took this advice to heart. At seven months, Sam is certainly ready for his ‘œpersonality’ session and this makes me think that we should bite the bullet and make an appointment.
I’ve done a bit of research (because my smug ‘œI got the hell out of Ohio’ attitude still gets the best of me and any respectable parent in coastal California would never step into an Olan Mills) and found a charming, albeit more expensive option. After all, you get what you pay for, right?
Monkeys & Peas, a Los Angeles based photography studio that specializes in baby, maternity and children, offered this suggestion if you’re on a tight budget:
If you can only afford one portrait session during the year, choose either a newborn session or when your baby is sitting up but not yet crawling (6 – 9 mos). Newborn photography is not easy and being first-time parents, taking care of a baby full time is not an easy task – leave it to the experts. With birth announcements, if your photos look great, the cards automatically appear nicer. Another great time is around 6 – 9 months when your baby learns to sit up. Outfits look great at this age and this is when they have that quintessential cartoon baby look. Crawling will start the shedding of the baby fat which is what makes them look baby!
Our timing is perfect and for a few hundred bucks, I’ve done my parental duty and preserved his baby essence for years to come. Perhaps we’ll even allow it to adorn one of our walls’¦ he makes a handsome décor item. I see how the madness got started in Ohio!
If you’re a new parent and looking for a photographer, here’s another money saving tip offered by Monkeys & Peas:
Ask for details before booking a session. Low ‘œsitting fees’ which is the charge for the photographer’s time may mean higher print prices.
What have other parents done? Any money saving ideas to share?
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
The reminder to always ask about all fees *before* the session is key – I can’t imagine not having access to negatives, for example, so that’s something I always look for.
However, I long for negatives (or digital files) because I grew up in a family of photographers. We never had posed photos up, other than the occasional school picture on dressers, but had snapshots here and there in frames. You need a LOT of exposures to get those snapshots, though!
So the only additional adivce I’d give is thinking about how you want to use the pictures – if you’re not likely to display the posed photos, but you or a friend likes to take hundreds of snapshots, it may be worth investing a few afternoons to get more candid shots instead. The most expensive photos are the ones that never leave their envelope.
I’d love to be able to offer some advice here, but like Alice, I grew up in a family of photographers.
I will add that the difference today vs. photography when we grew up is that with digital media, you can afford to fire away until you get a good shot, and there’s no additional cost for the extra exposures. It may thus be worth taking a chance that you’ll get good shots on your own. (This requires a modicum of photography skill, though. For some, going with a pro may still be the best option.)
I think this is a matter of taste; I prefer candid shots, and studied photography in art school, so I’ve served as Official Sohn Fink Family Photographer. It’s easy to to tinker with contrast, cropping, and so on with any decent digital camera. But if you like the more formal, “this is a portrait of a baby” look, a pro is probably the way to go.
You might also consider contacting your local art school and see if a student interested in photographic portraiture might be interested in doing it for free or cheap.
Alice, Dana, Jennifer: All great points. We’re good about displaying the candid shots in small frames around the house, but after seeing the wall of fame (those professional portraits all lined up in sequence of age along their stairwell or hallway), it just made me wonder if we’re skipping out on something important in archiving our son’s life.
I think we’ll do one professional sitting in a month or two and even if it’s only displayed for a couple of years, it will eventually be given to him as a memento from his childhood. His one photo compared to the twenty that my nieces will each walk away with… but somehow I think he’ll thank us for not allowing him to win that competition.
Nina, I love it. I can just see a portrait of the little man in your living room.
The only professional photos I have of my son are the newborn hospital one, and then a few taken by the photographers who make the annual visit to schools or daycares. I only buy the pictures every 2 or 3 years, and I just buy the 5×7 size. So it’s not too expensive and it still makes for a nice “watch him grow” progression when the pictures are side-by-side. I think it’s almost more appealing than displaying pictures from every single year, since there’s such a noticeable contrast from one picture to the next.
And of course I have plenty of candid digital photos to capture the day-to-day stuff!