Desmond turns 18 months old tomorrow, wow did that go fast. Anyways today we had an appointment at The Picture People at the mall to get his 18 month portraits done. We have been going to Kiddie Kandids, but they had a major management changeover right around when he had his year pictures and we weren’t impressed. We decided to try somewhere new to see if we could find somewhere we like.

So we went to Picture People, we were beyond unimpressed, the staff all acted like they had better things to do then take pictures and the girl who was photographing Desmond didn’t seem to understand that he was 18 months old, so he doesn’t like staying still. We also felt very rushed with the picture taking. It was not a fun experience. We then had to wait 20 minutes for our pictures to come up on their computers so we could chose what prints we wanted. They all sucked. Part of that was our fault, his bangs hang in his eyes so it can be harder to get a good shot, but it is possible, I’ve done it, and since they use basically the same camera we have they should have been able to get at least a few cute shots, if they worked at it or cared. We looked at all the pictures and decided to skip getting any of them, they were all really rather bad. There were a couple of okay shots, but honestly I got better at the playground with the small camera while he was on the swing (which is tough based on timing).

So we left after deciding that we didn’t like any of the pictures, fortunately there was no sitting fee so all we lost was about 45 minutes of our morning. We then discussed what we wanted to do. I thought about cutting his bangs, which we are planning to do in India, but we really would prefer to do it in India, not this weekend. We decided to buy him a comb and see if we could comb his hair out of his face a bit instead. We also decided to try Kiddie Kandids again since we wanted the pictures this weekend so we can take some with us to India. So we went in made an appointment for 30 minutes later, since Desmond was hungry by then and heading downstairs to get Desmond some fries.

After heading back up I chose the backgrounds I wanted (at Picture People you have the choice of Blue, Charcoal, Light Blue and White, and they don’t list this anywhere), which there was a nice selection of choices at Kiddie Kandids, we chose the two we liked, changed Desmond into the shirt we wanted to start with and headed to the bay.

Here is where the huge difference happened, the photographer was having fun and understood that Desmond wasn’t inclined to stay still, he was 18 months after all. She had no problem with this and didn’t have a problem with the fact it took awhile to get his pictures done. She brought over props that she hoped would work, I brought over props I hoped would work and we got 6 good pictures. We were hoping for one more, but Desmond was quite emphatic that he was done after the 6th one, so we went with what we had gotten, rather then trying for the 7th pose (which would have replaced the one that was okay rather then great in the set of 6 we had).

Soon as we were finished with the pictures they were on the computer waiting for us to go through and decide which ones we wanted. It was nice, and the professionalism and care was so much better, and we liked all the photos. So we went ahead and got a package, so we have pictures for India.

Anyways the moral of this long story is I have Desmond’s 18 month pictures to post. We are also pretty sure that the management changed at Kiddie Kandids again, since these pictures went so much better then his 12 month pictures. I may try to find a coupon so we can try JC Penny’s and Sears studios to see how we like them, but at the moment it looks like we are sticking with Kiddie Kandids for now. Now here are the pictures.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Desmond. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.