Today we took Caroline to Sears to get her three month pictures taken. She wore an outfit I had purchased (before she was even born) for the express purpose of using it in her three month pictures.
She napped the whole way there thanks to the beauty of a car seat in a moving vehicle. However, when we were ready to take her pictures, she was groggy and not interested. She wouldn’t even look at the photographer let alone smile. Great. Total and complete strikeout.
Fortunately, they weren’t really busy so we arranged to come back in about an hour. We went to the family restroom area, gave her a bottle, let her stretch out on a blanket, and just generally chill. By the time we were ready to head back, she was looking a little more like herself, but still pretty low-key.
Apparently they decided to have the most experienced photographer work with our uncooperative child because we had a different photographer when we returned. This lady knew her stuff and when we talked with her we found out she’s been doing this for seventeen years. That’s a lot of baby photos. She was able to get Peanut to smile and we ended up with several nice photos which were made even nicer with some of the enhancements they can do with the computer. We did half the photos of just Caroline and then changed her outfit and did half of us as a family.
When we get them in a couple of weeks, I’ll put some on here. We made sure we got the name of the photographer so we can be sure to request her next time. I think the first girl was way too hyper and in your face with Caroline and she simply doesn’t respond to that kind of play. The other woman did a much better job with her.
So we survived our first portrait session! Thanks for all of the good tips and information you shared several days ago. It was very helpful!
Oh, the same thing happened to us when our oldest was just a year old and then a couple of months later. Bad experience, good experience.
For her first birthday, one of the grandparents paid for her to have her picture taken at one of the fanciest private photo studios in town. It was a bad combination of tired baby, fancy dress, older male photographer, and middle-aged assistant with a slightly scary foreign accent. They plunked her down in the middle of a lot of white paper (away from Mommy!) and tried to make her smile. Humph, nothing doing. She just wanted to be held and these bad people were keeping her away from us with their silly paper. I’ve seen better prison mug shots. We didn’t even buy a copy of the photo.
A short time later we went to the “average Joe” department store photo department and had a family photo and baby photos taken to send with our Christmas cards. The young girl there was SO NICE and knew exactly what to do. She got so many smiles out of Baby that we ended up buying–ahem–quite a few more prints than we had planned on doing. (Which made the photographer very happy too!) I think we still have a few leftovers from that session…
Hi Sallie,
I’m glad you had a good photographer the second time. If you wouldn’t mind sharing her name with me, I would greatly appreciate it. We had a good experience the first time but not so much the second time we went.