Bradley E.
1/5
Absolutely terrible experience at this studio. My fiancée and I received a "free" photo shoot at Petland, but it turned out to be a total scam. Apparently, the shoot itself was valued at $150 without receiving any photos. Note that many of the other one-star reviews (easily seen by sorting by lowest review) have a similar scenario, so beware.
The studio was in a residential basement that was not equipped to handle pets, despite it being a pet photo shoot. We brought our two cats and 2-month-old baby, to this cramped and uncomfortable space. The photographer only took about a dozen photos, about half a dozen poses with only a couple shots each, despite using digital equipment that allows for much more.
The poses and setting were very unnatural. We were floating in a blank expanse with an armchair like something from The Good Place. The photographer did a poor job of framing the shots with awkward angles. At one point after positioning my fiancée, he told her that her "thigh looked bigger than it needed to." He even leered at her chest.
After the shoot, the photographer launched into a sales pitch, despite our wishes to leave. He said that we would get 20% off only if we ordered right then and there and bought at least three framed pictures. One 8 x 10 alone was $145 and that was after the discount. A 4 x 6 wasn't much wasn’t much less, and the next size was insanely priced and obnoxiously large. He kept saying there was no pressure, but it was a super high-pressure situation with creepy used car salesman vibes.
We felt like we had been scammed into buying the one picture we did get. He had to calculate the "regular" price (since we didn’t get three), which seemed made up, and he even miscalculated it (luckily in our favor). You can't add 20% on to a price after removing 20% from the original and get to the same value. Multiplying by 1.2 is not the same as dividing by 0.8. In either case, $174 and $181.25 are very odd numbers.
He had a projector already set up to go through the photos as if he'd done this trap many times before. We got to compare photos of each pose, but usually the choice was "the one where our eyes are open." There was only one acceptable choice with all 5 of us in it, and it was one of the worst photos with our daughter's hands in front of her face. It was printed on a nice substrate, but having worked at a company that engineered the kind of printers that could produce it, I know how crazy this markup is. There’s a small advertising watermark in the corner, despite paying so much.
I don't know how good the photo would have to be to be worth this, and this was objectively a bad photo. I could've taken something better myself. The photographer did little to direct us before shooting. Our socks were in the photo rather than having us wear shoes. My fiancée forgot she had a hair tie on her arm. Her hair didn't look good, so he just said that he'd edit it after we paid for it, which is unacceptable, and the edits were too minor to fix the problem.
We've had much better photo sessions for much less money, with personalized attention and high-quality end products. For $450 including tip (less than three of these discounted 8 x 10 pictures after tax) we had an hour-long photo session at our own place that ended up running longer (compared to us being here for a total of 51 minutes including the sales pitch). There was a website we could log into to choose the photos we wanted (already all edited). We only paid a little more (included in that $450) than the original cost to get all 152 images, whereas this place was asking $90 for a single social media resolution image. In another case, we had a personalized watercolor painted and framed for $75. Both were within the past 3 months for pricing context.
Overall, it was a very uncomfortable experience that left us feeling ripped off. We also had to pick up the photo ourselves, despite paying an insane fee. How they have maintained 100 years of business is a mystery. I would not recommend this photography studio to anyone.
