How much do you spend on family portraits?

[smiles33]

So my brother and sister-in-law got us a gift certificate for a photo session with their awesome wedding photographer. I just found out today that the $450 gift certificate doesn't include any photos or even the hi-res images (that costs another $500). So it costs almost $1000 and you still end up with no prints at all. yikes!

At the same time, I bid $100 on a session with a different photographer at a charity auction (retail is $250) and found out he charges about $1500 for a large wall portrait.

I guess this is why we have never taken family photos!

Do folks really spend thousands of dollars on family photos? Poll coming.

[SnuggleBuggles]

I paid $250 and it included the session and 5 images that we could have processed anywhere we wanted. I got photo cards made at Target, for example. She was great too

[crl]

Our first family pictures with ds probably cost around a thousand, including about five prints. Since then I have gotten Groupon type deals and paid under a hundred including either some of the images and/or some prints. I love our first pictures, but the subsequent ones are very nice too.

Catherine

ETA. Our recent Groupon experiences have been in San Francisco.

[cuca_]

We've had professional portraits of our children done twice and both times it was over $1000. That did not include any digital images. The first time we did it the photographer only worked with film. The second time, it was digital, but we did not purchase the images. The portraits are beautiful and are printed in archival quality paper. Keep in mind that sometimes the price does not include framing, which is another expense. Our first photographer framed the pictures for us, the second did not.

Also, I think the price will vary by regional area. When we had ours done we were in the suburbs of NYC. I recently purchased a session with a photographer where we currently live (Midwest), and the prices are much lower.

[WatchingThemGrow]

Ooh. We're super-cheapos here. We just go to portrait Innovations frequently and spend $60-120 there a couple times a year. We paid like half a billion dollars for our wedding photography, then we were so busy with babies that we never got the prints we were supposed to, had the ILs pick out the pictures for the album (that we did get), and we waited so long that she must have purged our files after a number of years. I saw the photographer's DD at a bounce house, talked with the DH, and we called her on the phone (all very kindly because we do love her!) She felt horrible that she didn't have access to the photos anymore, but we were lame and didn't get them within several years. Totally our fault.

I guess we don't get professional portraits done now because we feel we spent so much on them before and walked away with very little. We do have tons of PI portraits, though. TONS. Definitely not the same quality, but at least they are memories of seeing our DC grow. We get in the picture every Spring.

[LMPC]

Once a year we get pictures of DD and family shots done. Sitting fee+rights to the images runs a bit over $1000. Her photography is amazing and to me worth every penny :) I use unitprints.com to print them out....great quality!

[ohiomom1121]

We go back and forth between Portrait Innovations and a photographer in my area. With him we usually spend around $500 and the pictures are amazing. But I love getting the PI pics done as well and have been really happy with them. Obviously they aren't outside, and edited with lots of fun effects, and are much more "posed" but for the price they are great. $1000 is really high to me...can't imagine paying that!

[AngB]

My friend's sister is a part-time photographer.
She charges $90 for an hour plus session anywhere you want and then gives you a disc with the high resolution images that she has edited. We ended up with 360 images from DS's nine month pictures and most of them are fantastic. We can then print whatever we want, wherever we want, as she signs a photo release. We did this for his 6 month, 9 month, and this weekend his 1 year pictures. We plan to have her come to the hospital for newborn pictures when the next kid is born instead of doing the in hospital pictures. (Which was like $250 for 10 images, mediocre.)

We had found someone before this photographer who was supposed to do DS's 3m, 6m, 9m, and year pictures for $500 including a disc and prints. She was a nightmare to work with. I ended up having to file a complaint with the better business bureau and threaten to take her to small claims court when we still didn't have our pictures (we absolutely were prepared to take her to court if we had to, so it wasn't really a threat.) Finally in March, we got the pictures she took in July of last year (and of course she cashed the check in July of last year.) The pictures weren't even very good, so do be careful with photographers or those pretending to be them. (And this girl has an extremely professional website and gave no indications of being crazy until we tried to get our pictures.)

[sarahsthreads]

When we've gotten professional pics done, we've gone to JCPenney. I voted under $100, although there might have been a couple of times it was a bit more because we bought extra prints as gifts.

Honestly, I take pictures of my kids that are at least as good as - if not better than - the ones they take there. But I can't quite manage a good family shot on my own, and I am apparently the only person who can handle using my dSLR besides maybe my dad. In the hands of anyone else I get blurry photos. :shrug:

I would *never* get DH on board with paying anywhere near $1000 for family photos. He grumbles enough about the $100 at JCP every couple of years! (And points out that I spent that much on a camera, why would we pay someone else to take pictures.)

Sarah :)

[Pyrodjm]

I have had great Groupon experiences. All our 2hr sessions have been under $100 and very good quality shots. With each package we've gotten a print and a cd with 25-40 of the best shots.

[ZeeBaby]

We do PI. Honestly it never even occured to me to do super professional pics with the kids. I am just happy to get them smiling.

[zag95]

We've done Sears. We get a picture package and the CD (which we've used to do Christmas cards, etc). Tends to run 140-180 for the whole package, including photos that go to grandparents. Now that DD is older (4) we do them once a year- around Christmas, which is one mo before her birthday.

We also did Sears when she was younger- I think we had 6 mos and 12 mos.....

We've been totally happy with them!

[indigo99]

Being a professional photographer just means that you can get someone to pay you money for your work. It has nothing to do with how good you are.

It's sort of like restaurants and how you can get a meal for $5 at McDonalds or you can spend MUCH more at a fancy restaurant with a real chef. The actual experience and product just aren't the same so you can't really compare the prices.

As with restaurants, even the cheap, not-so-good photographers usually have people who are huge fans and love their work. However, paying a lot of money isn't going to necessarily guarantee that you love the result. There is just such a vast difference in price and product.

The confusing part is that you actually can find good photographers who take really nice photos and don't charge a lot of money. They're almost always either working part time or new to the business. Newbies usually think that they have to start out cheap to get business OR they are just really naive about how little of their gross is actually going to go into their pocket OR they have some other form of income and just love what they do so they don't have to make a living doing it. For those who do want to actually make a living at it, a $500-$1,000 session is required.

IME, a portrait session on location usually takes about 10-15 hours of work minimum (communicating with the client, getting everything charged, cleaned, and ready, traveling, scouting the location, shooting, uploading, sorting, setting up the gallery etc), and I actually net about 1/3 of my gross (not counting childcare expenses). If I want to pay myself just $8 an hour then I need to charge a minimum of $240 for the session. Of course that sounds too high to many people so I can't charge that much. Instead, I have to charge less up front and make enough profit from the prints so that an average sale is going to pay me enough to make it worthwhile. However, I do fully edit any prints that are ordered so that is going to add to the amount of time spent and mean that I need to make even more profit to pay myself that $8.

Also, if I KNEW that I could charge x amount and make $8 an hour then it would be very different, but the reality is that I may only shoot a few sessions in a given month because the work is so variable. Most people want weekend sessions, and the weather can affect sessions. I also have to basically be on call for newborn sessions so that we can do them within the first week, and people will cancel sessions at the last minute (family emergency or sickness usually). I can't just run out and find another client to fill the spot so all of those factors affect my income.

I could explain more about why established, full-time photographers charge what they do, but I think this post is long enough :D I will say that, as a photographer, I can't afford to pay another real photographer the sort of prices that I charge though. I just don't make enough profit to afford it. Luckily, photographers will usually exchange sessions with one another so that we can get some photos of our own kids once in a while.

[smiles33]

Thanks for your thoughtful answer, indigo. It makes a lot of sense. For the record, I LOVED my brother's wedding photos and the guy is really good at both capturing the shot and managing people, too. I just wrongly assumed that we would get hi-res files for $450. As it is, we will probably get the minimum package of $350 and just low-res files and then order 1 print to use up the remaining $100. DH will not agree to pay $500 for high res files!

[kozachka]

We used to take pictures at Sears when DS was young, and have done a few sessions at Picture People, about once every two years. We spend way less than $100 for each session, save for the first time or two.

That said, DH has a semi-professional dSLR and is good at taking photos (he's the artistic person in the family) so I don't feel like we are missing out that much. We have too many photos, and no space between the existing photos and DH's paintings. The only time we paid a lot of money (several thousand dollars) for photography was for our wedding.

[niccig]

DH takes amazing photos of DS and I, so we've got great pictures. I'm awful at the camera, so we don't have great one of DH and DS. We have a friend who is a professional photographer and we had one sitting where he charged for his time, but gave us the disk of photos. That was years ago.

To be honest, I've never understood the professional photos of 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 1 year etc as I don't like posed pictures, I'm more a casual photo fan.

[Neatfreak]

So, I'm one of the (currently three) people who voted in the $1000+ category. We found a photographer whom we have a great rapport with, and that's what it costs. We don't spend a lot of money on other things, so family photos every 2-3 years isn't a financial hardship and we're happy with the final product.

We also have had photos done at places like Sears and other portrait studios, and yes, my kids are smiling in them and the props can be cute, but those studio photos don't really say much about their personalities, and in the end, that's what is more important to us when we want to have some photographs to hang on our walls.

I'd love to be a photographer myself, but alas, my Photoshop skills are majorly lacking ...

[vludmilla]

I don't spend any money on professional photos. My DH is very creative and artistic and takes fantastic photos so I don't bother. I don't prefer the composed photos that professionals often take anyway.