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Review content:
When my husband and I were expecting our first baby, we were obviously excited and about the whole process and wanted to preserve the experience for ourselves and our family to come. That is when Studio M's ads and coupons, that found their way into one of the many coupons packs given to expecting mothers, caught our eye. She has a website where you can see examples of the work she does.
They are talented at Studio M and there is no doubt about it. Friendly and personable. It is a well established and good-looking studio out in Strabane (about a 40m-1h drive outside of Pittsburgh).
We had a coupon for $250 photo session for our baby at 3 sessions: newborn, 6 mo, and 1 yr. This price covered only the picture-taking sessions and a small 3-panel photo of all 3 sessions. We could add a maternity photo session for $50, which we opted to do.
The biggest complaint we have is that we were never given a straight answer about the cost of extra photos until the day we went in to see the photos, after already having made 2 trips out there and a 2-3 hr long maternity photo session. Beautiful slideshows set to music are created to start reeling us in, an easy job to do with soon-to-be parents. Next they helped us eliminate the ones we don't like. Even though I had asked again to see the price list, she still preferred waiting until we decided which photos we liked.
Finally when we narrowed in on the (many) beautiful images, and discussed with her how we would like to arrange them in our home, we were handed the package brochure with the long awaited details. By this point we had been steered and mentally prepped for the joy of owning these portraits, but to our surprise her prices were astronomical. I knew we weren't at JC Penny's and we were ready to spend a little money, but these prices were out of our range and more than we imaged. I was not allowed to take the price list home with me, but I kept my invoice to remind myself. $1,064 for a photo book (the medium size), and packages of photos ranging from $300-$4000 (at the $4000 range she would throw in a DVD).
Yes, it is true that we were still free to walk out the door and not spend a penny more than the $250 photo session, but we had already invested so much time and thought. It felt almost like a crafted emotional trap in our, again, vulnerable state.
When we left, we felt terrible for having spent so much money for one of the smallest packages available ($495 for 1 11x14 and 3 8x10 photos) and we felt we had been taken for a ride as we were swooned into it and never told upfront, in a timely manner how much this experience was going to cost us.
We did the maternity shots and the newborn, but never returned for the 6 mo or year old ones. In the end we spent around $2465 + $250 for 2 photo sessions, 8 wall portraits and a photo book. We would have had to take out a loan to pay for any more photos from Studio M.
When we got home with the images and hung them on our wall, we even noticed that some of the touch-ups are all little off. She moved an image of my head (that I liked better) into a photo with my husband and I (that my husband looked better in), and the size of my head is not in proportion. Also, a maternity shot of my stomach looks like sections of my stomach were bruised, which was not the case. It must have been touched up by someone who couldn't see the impact of their color choice well enough on the computer.
I don't want to take away from the beautiful work that the studio produces by posting this review, but I think it is only fair that people know what they are getting themselves into. You may want to take out an insurance policy on the photos after you get through paying for them. But Studio M needed to be more upfront with us the very first time I asked about the costs of the whole affair and they may need to hire more careful people to do the touch-ups.
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