Grace's Birthday pictures

Count Brenda and I into the category of fans of Portrait Innovations! Leading up to Grace's first birthday we took her to have her picture taken at Sears every 3 months so that we could watch her grow. Each time it was a difficult experience. Nobody at Sears seemed to be able to get Grace to interact at all. It usually came down to Brenda and I deciding on 1 decent picture out of the set to use. For Grace's 2 year old picture, we decided to try someplace different. We went to Portrait Innovations. Talk about a great experience. Just like in the previous times, Grace was fussy and not at all interested in having her picture taken. The difference was that this time, the photographer took her time to draw Grace in and make her feel more comfortable. We took some family shots and used lots of different props to keep Grace engaged. It also helped that they took a ton of pictures!

Not only did they take lots of pictures, we used 2 different studio rooms and several different backdrops along with 2 different outfits. We also consider ourselves very blessed, because Missy (my very girlie twin sister) has 2 very typical boys. Missy finds great joy in finding and assembling fun and "girlie" outfits for Grace. This outfit was a "must" for her birthday shoot.

So, 100 pictures later (seriously, 100!), we sat down at the big screen plasma TV to pick out poses and settings for our package. At Sears, we usually picked THE one that was good and ordered lots of sheets of 5x7 portraits to send to family. This time, we had WAY too many to pick from. By the time we were done narrowing down the pictures, we had everyone covered and we didn't have to order any extra sheets. As a matter of fact we had more than we really needed. We had twice as many 5x7s as we usually ordered, tons of wallets, more 8x10s than we needed and a few 10x13s that we definitely didn't need. Usually, when we ordered our prints from Sears, they would throw in some different pictures that weren't ordered using their special effects or larger prints that they would offer to sell us at a discount. With Portrait Innovation, we ended up with more pictures included than we could have ever expected. It also cost us the same as what we had been spending at Sears as part of their "special member" program. Needless to say, we won't be going back to Sears Portrait Studio. Oh, and with our package deal, they put our pictures on a CD... and not just the ones we selected for print, but ALL of the 100 photos they took.

One last detail to the Portrait Innovation mini-commercial here, the pictures were ready for us before we left the studio. 20 minutes after we picked the poses, Brenda and I were thumbing through the prints. And we had lots of great Gracie smiles staring back at us. I have loaded a few on the public photo album for you to see. Above is the family picture that is now hanging in our Family Room. I even put a link to Portrait Innovation on our list of favorite links on the right hand tool bar.