Picture People = Fail

I have been attempting to get good pictures of the babies for family members for a while now and have had a heck of a time myself. In order to do a little photo-shoot with the both of them, I need some help and things have just been a little too crazy in our house lately. Plus, I don't have a true backdrop stand and with The Squishy (or Category 5 as we also call him), setting it up my seamless paper on the fireplace mantle is just asking for a diaster. So, I finally gave up and scheduled an appointment with The Picture People at the local mall since they have a pretty good coupon going on now. I took Emma there once when she was a baby and wasn't so impressed, but I figured we would try it again with the coupon and finally be able to give the grandparents pictures that they have been asking for.

FAIL.

I normally not one to bad-mouth a business but I'll just say that I won't be heading back to The Picture People again. We had a 10:20AM appointment (keep in mind the mall opens at 10:00AM) and after waiting 45 minutes with a two and a half year old and a 9 month old we were FINALLY ready for our turn. The "photographer" was very nice but that's pretty much where the positives end. I will be the first to say that its a tough job for anyone to get a good picture of our two little ones together, especially since Emma wasn't exactly cooperative. However, having said that, out of the probably 20 pictures we got (we purchased the high resolution CD), we probably got about 5 decent pictures. Most of the remaining pictures were either just flat out bad pictures because of composition, or out of focus.

Wes and I were the ones running around trying to get the babies to cooperate (which I can expect so the photographer can be ready to snap the second they are ready), but they were less than helpfull with coming up with ideas on how to get them to cooperate. It was up to us to go through all the "stuff" they had, try to come up with ways to get Squishy to stand, etc. So after an exhausting and frustrating session, which we were hurried out of, we got a whopping five pictures for $80.

I called and provided my feedback as well as sent an email and went back to the store on Sunday to see what they could do. After "sharepening" the pictures, I was sent home with another CD (after about an hour of waiting around) and although some pictures were better, we still only have a handfull of images.

So here are the "good" ones, we received.

The Squishy

The Babies

At least Jackson is in focus...ugh. It gets worse the bigger the picture gets...

(The Squishy looks GINORMOUS in the tiny wagon.)

The only way Emma would let us take her picture is if she held the "bitar". Ugh. 

This is what happens when you try to let the Squishy stand up by holding on to his big sister...

And this is what happens when you try to get a good picture of Emma by herself with no guitar...

This is what happens when you get hurried out of a photo-session and mommy is busy trying to wrangle The Squishy with a hurt neck. She doesn't realized that his hair is out of control and there is mass quantites of drool on his chin. Then you get pictures like this which are cropped WAY too tight and cut half the picture off.

We tried Mimi and Gigi!