What to Do About Bad School Pictures

Ever had this happen? It’s picture day at your child’s school, you’ve picked out something special for them to wear, taken a little extra time to do their hair just right, made sure their little faces were squeaky clean before they headed out the door to catch the bus?

Then, about two months later on a blustery Fall afternoon, you notice a large packet mixed in with your child’s pile of “take home” papers for the day. They’re here! Your child’s school pictures are back!

You flip the envelope around to the side with the clear window, ready to behold the adorable image that is your child. And there it is. The worst picture of them that you’ve ever seen. Maybe their eyes are half closed, perhaps they had ketchup on their chin, it could even be that their hair is stuck to their forehead with sweat. It might just be that they’ve got a very unnatural expression on their face, their collar is flipped up on one side, or they are straining so hard to smile that it looks as though their bulging eyes will pop right out of their head at any moment.

Whatever it is, you are disappointed and know that there’s no way you can send these out in your Christmas cards! What are you going to do? You scan the envelope for the photographer’s contact information. You call and they tell you that there is a photo re-take session scheduled at your child’s school in a couple of weeks. Whew! Problem solved.

Or is it?

Unfortunately, it may not be the solution you were hoping it would be. Why? Because too often these days, the photographers that show up at your child’s school to take your child’s picture are inexperienced, lazy, and disinterested. Ever since my oldest child, now 15, had her First Grade school pictures taken, I’ve been wondering “What the heck are these people thinking?” It’s not possible that I would be the only one to notice how bad the pictures are. Oh, we’ve been lucky a few times, and ended up with really good school pictures on the first try. But only a few times.

When I was a child, I remember that the photographer sat us down carefully, had someone run a comb through our hair, and took 2-3 photos of each student. I never once needed retakes, and in looking at my school pictures from childhood, all of them were more than acceptable. I have been at the school helping out on several occasions when my children were having school pictures done. Across the board, at several different schools located in 3 different states, I saw the same thing over and over. The child sits, nobody bothers to fix a collar or brush hair away from the face or grab a kleenex to wipe a nose even! Whatever condition the child is in when they sit down, is the condition they’ll be in when the photo is snapped. I’ve never once heard any of the school photographers use an effective method for getting the kids to smile, I’ve even seen them snap the photo without giving the child a chance to smile at all!

How can this be, you ask? The only conclusion that I can come up with is that when it comes to many of the current photographers who come along to take school pictures, they are just there for the money and not at all for the art that photography is. Bottom line, these cherished portraits that document milestones in your child’s life and mean so much to you, don’t mean diddly-squat to them.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky, and on retake day, your child’s pictures will come out fine. If not, I have a couple of suggestions. One, call the company again, and this time, in a firm but respectful manner, explain your situation. Since school photographers now require that payment for the prints be made at the time the photo is taken, we no longer have the option of just not ordering the bad photo. No, either you order on picture day, or you don’t get school photos that year, no matter how good they may have come out. I believe some companies give you the option of ordering after the fact, but prices appear to me to be different in that circumstance. Higher, of course. At least that’s what I’ve seen, but different companies may do things differently. Once you have explained your problem to the company respresentative, listen to the options they give you, if any. Perhaps there’s a retake day at another local school that you can take your child to? If that is too inconvenient for you, my second suggestion is this: ask the company rep if there is a studio in the area where you can bring your child in to have their pictures done. We were not aware of the option to do this in some places. But this year, I had called our school photography company and told them that I was returning my oldest child’s pictures, and would not even be ordering any for my two younger children. I explained that both the first photo and the retake had come out just awful and that I was very disappointed that the photographer had obviously not even tried to get a halfway decent shot of my child, who happens to be about the most photogenic person I know! It’s difficult to take a bad picture of her, to be honest. When they had the Manager of the local studio location call me, offer to let me bring the kids in and stand by until I saw a shot that I felt was acceptable, and even offer to comp me all 3 packages in an effort to not lose my family’s business in the future, I accepted. They got great shots of each of my children by the second take, only once for my youngest daughter. Now why couldn’t they have just done that in the first place?

If all else fails, send the photos back, collect your refund, and take your child to a portrait studio like the ones found at Target, JCPenney, or even Wal-Mart. You can usually get a reasonably priced deal, especially with coupons you’ll find at the stores’ website, and you get to accept the poses you want. Additionally, you’ll be there to make sure hair is perfect, faces are clean, and there are no clothing mishaps. I have done this before, and the staff members are usually pleasant and helfpful in making the portrait appear as much like a traditional school portrait as possible. Perhaps if enough of us do this, the photography companies that take school portraits will begin to take notice and make some attempt at taking better pictures of our children. Until then, good luck.