The standard practice around here is that you prepay for the fall ones, and then you have the option of purchasing the spring ones.
And Lifetouch sucks.
What surprises me is the number of people around the country that have to deal with these photo monkeys. Isn’t there some other company that other schools use? Someone please tell me that their school uses some other contractor for annual portraits?! No?
I’ve got 12 years of awful Lifetouch school pictures haunting me. They must be stopped.
Absolutely not, you crazy person. There are two sets of grandparents and aunts and uncles, mostly just the aunts care, I think.
Unless… Wait a minute! I’ll go buy myself a fancy-ass digital SLR like I’ve been wanting, and maybe a tacky background, and I can set myself up in business! I betcha Walgreens (or Wolf Camera) can do the keybobs and the bookmarks. Yeah!
Well of course.
But my question was serious. It’s not mandatory that your kids get their pictures taken, is it? I mean, if they refuse they wouldn’t get suspended or anything, right?
No, we don’t have to buy anything. They’d probably still take the picture but we aren’t required to buy them.
At my future in-laws’ house, there’s a fabulous example of why a lot of these school photographers suck. On one wall, there’s various photos of both my fiance and his sister. One in particular makes him look intentionally evil. The story behind the photo: fiance tells photog. not to use soft focus as it gives his eyes a faintly evil glint; photog. uses soft focus, and evil glint ensues. The difference between this portrait (senior year HS) and his college graduation portrait is that he looks like a maniacal axe murderer in the HS photo and a normal, well-adjusted person in the other one.
Lifetouch happens to be the outfit under discussion in this thread, from just about five years ago. Only the second thread I ever started.
Please take note of the fact that it is a five-year old thread, and DO NOT post to it.
In elementary school they took all the single photos and made a summary one of the class. Do they still do that?
If I may suggest looking for a My Photographer outfit near you. They take appointments, give you the package cost up front, and are pretty reasonable. If your family wants a decent picture of your kid, this is the way to go. Also, the photograhers there are not nincompops and do a pretty good job with kids, so you should get some nice pictures. I’d link to mine but they have expired 
I’m curious… what would have been the consequences if a parent had just told the school to get bent? I don’t see how they could require something like that. I mean, I know they could say it was required, but…
Oh, we weren’t required to buy pictures at all, but if we wanted to buy some, we had to pre-pay before we saw them, and then go through the trouble of a refund if we didn’t like them.
I don’t mind them taking the pictures and then sending home the packet - then we can either send them back or pay for the ones we want to keep. Occasionally I’ll get a good picture. My younger son’s fall picture was pretty good.
Click on the link, and you’ll see. BTW, it was Lifetouch I [metaphorically] told to get bent, not the school. The denouement is in post 39.
mudgirl’s school does, and it’s the only photo taken at school that I ever shell out money for. My hubby has a totally sweet digital Nikon D200, and has even worked as a professional photographer. I don’t need the crap pics the school takes. In fact, I just got a sample of the school photo they took last month, and it looks like shit. She’s an adorable kid, but I much prefer the photos I have right here, taken by her father. They show her holding Fred, her tarantula. I’m guessin’ you couldn’t get a school photographer to do that. 
How are you ‘expected’ to shell out for pictures both times?
My son’s school does photos twice a year, but I only buy the individual shots once. The second round, I just buy the class photo. No one’s forcing me to buy the individual pictures again. And I only buy them because I want to - it’s not required.
Your school administration does. And yes, they (the school) get a financial kickback from Lifetouch for it.
So continue to vent here it that makes you feel better.
But if you want to actually do something about it, do your venting in the office of the school administration.
Plus if you just refuse to buy any of the pictures (and encourage the other parents to refuse, too), Lifetouch may find your school unprofitable and stop coming there.
No, they’re assuming you’ll like the cool nifty stuff (keytags, bookmarks etc.) they send with the spring pix, and/or will lose the packet before you remember to return it.
I’m still pissed at the year they took a horrible picture of Moon Unit when we had to prepay (the fall pics are always prepay-only). We sent the pics back on retake day. And THE TEACHER FORGOT TO SEND HER DOWN TO THE RETAKE ROOM. So I called the school office and they said “just mail them back and they’ll refund”. But they didn’t have any kind of addresses on the damn envelope. And I never got around to calling the Lifetouch assholes and so through a combination of bad photographic technique, stupid school people, and my own laziness I was out the cost of the photos.
This is all aggravated by the fact that neither of my kids seems capable of producing a decent-looking smile on demand - “pained grimace” seems par for the course - and of course those photo sessions are cattle calls and they have about 3 nanoseconds per kid so no time to get a good picture.
It’s so easy to just snap a pic and have Wal-Mart print off a shit load of wallets or 8.5x11s or whatever. Today with digital cameras, you can preview and even edit the photos. Why would anyone pay inflated prices for 3rd rate garbage pictures?
You do have other options. If you continue to give these shitbags money, it’s your fault. Hell, even Department Stores and Wal-Marts have cheap photostudios if you want that professional look (ie. The dull, light gray backdrop).
Lifetouch seems to manage to hire the negatively tallented on a kind of scarily consistant basis. My kid was a model for a while and every professional photographer we ever worked with said the camera loves this kid. In the 8 years we have been doing school pictures there has not been one good picture and several truely awful pictures, and as near as I can tell there is no one else that does this anymore.
And guess what company owns several of those potrait studios? I’ll give you a hint, it begins with an L. . .
Or, you can do what we did once. Dress the kids up, grab the digital camera, and go to a fancy store with some props (Boston Store, Macy’s around here) on display. Furniture sets, hanging carpets, drapery displays - all make good natural looking backdrops for childrens photos. Just take a few shots with the children posing on the furniture or bed or in front of one of the fake window sets they have for the drapes. Or you can clear some space on a wall at the casa and hang some linens up as a backdrop, set up a backlight and take some poses there too.