I won a competition

…well when I say won I’d imagine there are a lot of winners!  I filled in a survey at tescos for Venture photography and the “lucky” winner got a studio session and photo.

We’ve been to Venture before and I remember it being a bit stressful, but they did get lots of good shots …but we hardly bought any because they were so ridiculously overpriced!  So we booked our “prize” which is when the fun began!  Me and Richard both said we had no desire to be in the shots, but in order to validate our prize we had to be in some…both of us!  This meant we struggled to book a session when the kids weren’t in school and Richard wasn’t in work!  We got there and she asked what sort of picture we were hoping to get.  We have great photo’s of each of them on their own…thats quite easy to get but we don’t have a single good one of all three.  Someone is always looking the wrong way, blinking, not smiling, running away or just pulling a daft expression…or it’s blurry…or I’ve chopped someone off while concentrating on getting their attention!  So I said we were after a good photo of the 3 of them…NOT US!  She seemed to pay no attention to us what so ever and spent at least half of our studio session taking family photos which I hated every single one!!

Finally after 15 wasted minutes she took some of just the kids.  By this point Noah and Austin had started to get bored, the photographer also wasn’t very good with kids and didn’t have a clue how to get them to cooperate.  Basically by faffing about with her family shots she’d missed her window with the kids!  Finally our 30 minutes was up and I left feeling like I had been bullied into having my picture taken way too many times (surely 2 or 3 would have filled the terma and conditions??!!)

We returned a couple of weeks later for our viewing!!!!  Again they insisted we both attend…they’re not soft on this one…they knew full well I’d turn up grab my freebie (the best of the 3 of them together) and not be persuaded to buy anything!!!!  Richard is a soft touch and was persuaded :-)!

So we viewed our photos and at least the woman showing them to us had the sense to realise she needed to delete ALL of the ones with me in before I walked out.  She then defended that term and condition by saying it helped the kids to relax……missed their window of attention span in our case!!  There were some gorgeous ones of Caitlin on her own…but she always takes great photos and we have loads of her so we deleted those (maybe if we were mega rich), there were very few of Noah…his smiles looked really forced and he didn’t like the photographer so she hadn’t got any decent ones so they were deleted.  There were a few nice ones of Austin and since we’ve never had any proper photos of him done Richard picked one of him…it is a lovely photo but not worth the money it cost really….

As for the photo of all three of them we only had about 5 or 6 to choose from and only 2 were ones I liked.  I liked them both the same but didn’t really love either so we had one as our free photo.  It is nice…but I’m sure any studio (or anyone with a decent camera – that’ll be me once I’ve learnt how to use it – and a clear background – not sure I’ll ever have a clear background!) could have taken an equally good one. 

We’ve been to pixifoto before and for the same price as our one picture we bought we could have chosen about 10 from there!!!!  So all in all not a great experience….would have been if they had actually bothered to listen to what I wanted and not wasted pretty much all the studio time on family shots and single shots…but they seemed to think they knew best and would be able to prove to me I wanted a lovely family portrait for about my fireplace!  Stupid prices aside..they would never ever have persuaded me on that front!!!!!!!!!

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