Chewed Slippers Photography

Go Bankrupt For Some Photos

My wife and I discovered this company at the Annual Pet's in the Park event. They lured us in with a "Spin-The-Wheel" game to get a discount on professional pet photography. After "winning" a $25 coupon, we were given the sales pitch to go through with a photo session, which we caved and signed up for our 3 dogs to get professional photos done. The idea was that we would get a 1-hour photo session for $125, and then have to pay for prints, photo books, etc later. This was a given. Well, my wife took the a morning off of work to bring our dogs to the studio, at which point it was revealed that instead of a 1-hour photo session we were now getting a half-hour session with two photographers simultaneously. I guess their logic is if there were 4 photographers the session would only last 15 minutes. Anyway, we excused this because they did work in a timely manner and still managed to get lots of photos in, with many different sets and themes. When it was time to actually do our viewing of the photos (they get you to come back to the studio so it's harder to say "no" to them because it's in person rather than online) they revealed that each digital photo (not print, but DIGITAL) was going to be $22 each. Meaning if we wanted all the photos it was going to cost us around $400-$500... JUST FOR THE DIGITAL FILES. That doesn't even include any physical prints, let alone an entire album. So now if we wanted the 30 minute photo shoot, all the digital files and some prints and albums printed, we are looking at just shy of $1,000 (oh but don't worry, they assured us they have payment plans, like that makes up for it). They also promise that even if you decide not to buy anything, you can walk away with a web-quality image of our choosing. When we attended the viewing we expressed our concern, and overall anger, that we weren't informed prior to booking the shoot that the $125 literally gets us nothing. We inquired about their tactic in careful choice of words when making their initial sales pitch and they responded "Well, we have to make money somehow." Since we were promised, at the very least, one web-quality image for free we decided to sit through the viewing to choose one. Now, the photos, all of them, were amazing. The quality was there, so don't get me wrong on that front. These guys for sure know what they are doing in terms of quality. However, we were now faced with the difficult choice of having to go broke or never see these photos again. Because of our concern they did say we could walk away with up to 5 web-quality photos for free, in an attempt to lessen our anger. However, 2 weeks and an email conversation later, these photos have still not arrived in our inbox. We even spoke to our wedding photographer and he expressed his surprise that this company charges so much for even the digital photos, and that none of that was made clear prior-to or even after the photo shoot. If you want professional photos take of your pet, these guys do have the knowledge and skill to take beautifully composed photos with lots of attention to detail and overall quality, however they are very money hungry and are sneaky about it. If you think you are getting anything for your initial payment of over $100, think again. If you want to keep only 3 DIGITAL photos then you are paying $70 in addition to the photo shoot cost, and if you want all the digital photos then be prepared to be blindsided with an end bill of over $500, and that's not even including anything PHYSICAL to hold or display in your home. So while we may only be out $125, we are also out 2 hours of our time, my wife missed an entire morning's worth of a pay check for missing work, and we don't even have anything to show for it, which really hurts now that we have seen the photos and can never have them.