Over the weekend, Mr. W, Allie and I went back to the photo studio for our photo viewing and ordering session. I was right that prints from the studio were going to be expensive. The photography studio won’t give a digital version of anything you don’t buy prints for, so if you like a pose and would like to use it for online sharing or to use as a wallpaper on your phone or computer you have to buy prints first. Then you get a smaller-resolution digital version (that according to the photographer is “not printable,” not sure what they mean) of the purchased pose. This isn’t particularly conducive to modern day lifestyle, because people don’t have a bunch of printed photos laying around anymore. We share via online media, and the most printing many of us do is photo holiday cards once a year. Mr. W shares his photos exclusively via his iPad, the modern-day version of the photo wallet. When I’m asked for recent photos or videos of Allie, I pull out my smart phone.

That being said, we walked out of there with 2 poses ordered in various combinations of sizes and about $235 spent ($85 for the sitting fee and two 5x7s of one pose as their discounted holiday special, and for $150 more we ordered a second pose in a large print we could frame, plus a couple extra 5x7s of the first post we could give to grandparents). We were shown a slideshow with 20 or so of what the photographers considered their best edited photos, which we narrowed down to 8 of our favorites, and chose our 2 poses from there. I’m pretty loathe to let some of them go, and the photographer offered to give us a CD of all of them in full resolution sizes for $850, but…ouch. Kari’s photos are as good or better and we get her edited images on a CD, she came out on location for the shoot, all for $125, so I made Christmas cards from Kari’s digitals. (Because Kari does release her digital versions, she’d already emailed me quite a few so that I could make my xmas cards, but we won’t be able to get anything from the studio until shortly before Christmas and they’re already doing a “rush” job for us.) I totally get that Kari has less overhead as she’s not running a photo studio and having to pay rent, utilities and props/studio equipment, but that’s quite a huge difference in price. For the studio portraits (and they did very nice work and had great service), a 5×7 is $40 and subsequent prints purchased of the same pose is at a discounted price. They basically made it unaffordable for us to have a variety of shots for personal use. I suppose what we’re paying for is the work and man-hours put into creating and retouching each photo, not necessarily in the costs of making the prints themselves.

I think the photo studio will have to rethink the way they design their packages to fit the way photos are used these days, but I don’t see us going back for portrait shots, despite the fact that they do nice work and are wonderful people.