School photo scam pt2

-
About three years ago I posted my thoughts about The Great School Photo Scam here, well it's come around again this year.

This time the photo isn't too bad really. The poor quality sample on the order form probably hides the full quality of the image however it's still not great. The lighting is very flat and my sons expression is more bored than happy.

As I said last time, I have a camera and I take some great photos of my son, I have no need for the school photo and I'm certainly not paying £16.50 to download it. In the last year or so I have been developing myself as a photographer. Is it time for me to step up and do some sort of pop up portrait session? Not because I want to make some money out of it but because I think people deserve something a bit better than what the school photo offers.

School photo:

Random photo I took while we were out one day:

I know which one I prefer and if I took the time to set up lighting and a backdrop then I'm confident I could get a much better photo than the one from school.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photography Project

-
Image
A few months ago I decided I would like to try to put together a series of photos about life with a disabled son, the problems that arise and stuff like that. I'm not 100% clear on the brief myself but I thought it will become more apparent as time goes on. Eventually I was thinking I could display these in a gallery setting of some sort, I just need to develop the concept further until I'm happy with it. I'm only got nine photos so far and I'm not even sure I'll keep all of them but I thought I'd start sharing some of them here. This is the first photo I took. It's very dark and without context it's probably hard to see what's going on. This photo was taken at 3:07am. John wakes up most nights and it can be a struggle to settle him back down to sleep. One way I try to do this is just to climb onto his bed, sit him on my knee and cuddle him. Doing it this way I can attempt to stop him throwing his arms and legs round and he settles down agai
Read more

The school photo scam

-
It's that time again. School photos. Great yeah? No. I've got a camera, I'm perfectly capable of taking a photo of my sons. I take lots of phots and keep the best. I've got loads of great photos of my sons. So why do I need to sit my son in front of a stranger with a camera for 10 seconds, hope he is willing to smile then pay twenty odd quid for a few photos that aren't even that good? At least these days we get a choice of photos, we can either have sinister or serious. Not smiling or happy or laughing. When none of them are great, I'm not paying out for them. I not going to spend money on photos I don't want just because it's his first school photo.
Read more

The benefits journey pt2

-
So far so good. I went back for the meeting with my booklet filled in. The guy there checked through it then proceeded to tell me all about how to apply for jobs through the job centre. Thanks but no thanks. Next step is to apply for carer's allowance and wait. This could be a long wait. Carer's allowance people take about 8 weeks to process new claims apparently. As I am applying for income support I need an income to support, this will be the carer's allowance that my wife was getting. Unfortunately you cant just transfer this from one parent to the other, so she had to cancel it and I had to apply for it. It's going to be a lean few weeks until this is all sorted but as long as I can pay the rent then I'll be happy.
Read more