Should You Need to Pay for Santa Pictures?

Posted on 12 23, 2008 under Brokedad by foodad | Comments

santaclausI read an article last week about a Santa who was ripshit because people were taking their own pictures of kids sitting on his lap at the mall.  His argument was that the price was not that expensive, starting around $10 Canadian and that people were ripping off the photography team.

Come on St. Nincompoop! Having Santa in the mall creates mall traffic. It’s not our fault you were a poor negotiator and are now counting on getting a cut of the photo revenues to make your rent or buy your next bottle of Christmas cheer! What do you think, noodads?

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    Sorry dude, if there's a charge then it's not photos for free. If you want free photos of your kids with Santa, rent a suit and get someone to take the pics. And don't buy into that whole commercial Santa scene. Once you do, you have to play by the rules. You're taking money out of someone else's pocket,- being judgmental doesn't change that and I bet you'd be pretty shirty if someone took money out of yorus. You might also want to consider that, frequently, the money or a percentage of it goes to support a charity that needs it. And of course, Santa has to put up with your screaming kids. So quit whining and pay the santa his due..
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    I say no freebies. You should have to pay to see your kid scream in bloody fear.
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    and here i agree with noodad. why should they get paid for a picture you could easily take yourself? santa is there to listen to what the kids want--in the holiday spirit, if you cant act like santa, dont take the job! santa doesnt need money, he lives on fairy dust, or something.
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    A good rule of thumb: Unless you or God built the set, you should not prohibit those who did from making a living.

    Shooting over a photographer's shoulder teaches your kids to be rude, passes on the unreasonable sense of entitlement that you appear to possess to capitalize on the work of others, and may even cause the photographer's strobes to fire, thereby costing him or her money.

    If you can't bear to part with your money in such a fashion, find a photographer-less Santa. They do exist, and can typically be found in locations far more palatable than shopping malls.

    Merry Christmas and happy holidays to noodads everywhere!
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    Well we did the first Santa picture this year. We, like many first time parents, debated about the whole Santa thing. Well after waiting in line for an hour (ok, it's part of the experience and it was fun to hang out with other parents), we sat our kid down for the infamous picture.

    Normally he's pretty smiley but I felt like the only goal of the photographer was to quick take a picture and then move along (probably because he was a baby and couldn't talk to Santa anyways). To her credit she did try a few things but it really would have taken about another minute to get him to smile.

    So we opted for the digital picture on CD. $24.99 +tax later, we walked away with picture in hand.

    So I loaded it up on my computer and sure enough, there is all this extra software on the CD with meaningless extras. Well I managed to find the jpg (at least include a raw with the jpg man... we paid 25 bucks for it) and opened the photo.

    Well I was not impressed at all with the quality. The lighting was not very good at all. In fact I found there were some blown out areas of the photo (confirmed when I look at the photo histogram) and overall the photo is way to dark. So I would hope with the several soft boxes they had, they could have done a slightly better job. Plus for a little over 25 bucks for a single photo, they could have at least taken a dry run picture or 2 before the kids arrived. I understand a mall does not have the best lighting (I mean we are not going to drape a scrim or anything over Santa) but this location actually had fairly decent lighting.

    The good news is at the family get together, we got a couple of cute pictures with Santa. But my $24.99 +tax picture, meh.
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    I don't think we ever paid for it, I strongly believe nobody pays for the Santa pictures!

    Emma
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    established that children's heart was the throne room like it loves us
 

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