Somehow I completely missed blogging about our family photos that we had done back in October. We have kind of lost confidence in professional pictures as time has passed. I remember when we used to go to Sears portrait studio regularly, and then we had a couple of negative experiences in a row and decided it was time to go somewhere else. We tried Wal Mart’s portrait studio once and the pictures didn’t turn out very good. We have been going to JC Penny’s portrait studio for some years now, but they are changing again. The ‘photographers’ aren’t professionals. They are usually just young girls that get hired, and the the portrait studio seems to have a history of firing them and hiring new girls so that nobody works there for long. We used to just order all of our photos on a cd for $100 (about 30 photos max). Last time we were there, they had upped the price to $150 for the cd but only allowed 20 pictures. 🙁 Not to mention that after getting them on my computer we found that the resolution is less than our own personal camera produces. I have not been happy with school pictures either. I remember when I was a kid, waiting in line to have my school picture taken, as I got close to the front of the line seeing a big box of combs. There was always someone standing there to comb down stray hairs, and make sure you looked good before the photographer actually snapped the picture. They don’t do that anymore. I will send my kids out the door looking good, but then get the pictures and find their collar or hair messed up. So as time for school photos approached this year, I was feeling less than enthusiastic about buying them, and didn’t really want to just go to the mall for photos like we have in the past. So we decided to let one of our neighbors take pictures for us. She does photography for a hobby and I’ve seen some of the pictures that she has taken for other people in the ward and they look nice. The only thing is she doesn’t have a studio so she only does outdoor photography, that is something completely new for us.
She also took some individual pictures of the kids to take the place of school photos this year.
As always there is a shot of Jeremy just being goofy:
