To hate modern 'class' photos?

[plantsitter]

Where's the sense of occasion? Why are they doing cheesy poses in socks? What exactly is wrong with the class in the school hall so you actually know where they are??

(I might be feeling sore cos they grouped my admittedly tall DD with all the shortest kids and she looks like Gargantua...)

"In dd1's class there is a girl who can do the splits really well, and there she is every year in the front doing the bloody splits. Next year I might teach dd1 to flip the bird at her from the back row."

😂😂😂😂😂 love this!

Ours are next month. Last 2 years have had the awful fake happy poses ones, I'm going to ask which type they are having this year. Will be very disappointed if it's not back to traditional.

I have the long ones of each DC from nursery. They are just rolled up in the tube in my wardrobe. DDs is worse as they have them all dressed in graduation cap and gowns. You can barely see who is who!

Yanbu ours were awful. Kids with arm round teacher etc. The parents voted the traditional ones back in the next year.

We've never had the new ones, just the traditional formal ones. I've bought every single one for my sons, they're great to look back on.

I did have to ask my oldest son which person was the teacher though on his final sixth form one.

My youngest had a whole school photo when he was in reception which is really lovely, so sweet, and this year (Year 11) he's had a whole year one which is quite scary as they look so old. His oldest friend, who doesn't turn 16 until the end of August, is sporting a full beard on it

We only ever had one class photo taken when I was at school, I think I was 12.

I'm a teacher and I hate them. One year a group of girls decided to lift up another girl between them, with legs apart. She was wearing tights but it still looked awful. Another time our headteacher was photoshopped into every class photo but on some he ended up looking shorter than the children!

To the the posters saying it's easy to take a photo these days-When was the last time any of them has actually done this, with 30 kids, and done it well enough to sell?

But I've no desire to own a hideous A4 sized photo of other people's kids

I think posters are saying it is easy to take a picture of their own children in uniform.

I am sure it is a bloody nightmare trying to take a photo of a whole class....especially if they are having to pose like synchronized swimmers!

I hate the new style too, children in odd poses, just looks silly. The older style was so much better and more compact.

Yes I don't suppose it's easy taking the whole class. But the last individual photo I got wasn't even in focus really.

Sorry i like the new fun ones.
but i dont see why, since all the kids are in one room, they cant do both so parents can buy what they like.
Its one more click, hardly any work, and maybe a bit more business cos some people may buy both!

Proofs of DS's came back last week; awful thing. He's in a group of 4 other boys and they're all doing a double thumbs up. Just hideous. Obviously the same photographer as their individual photos earlier in the year, because we got that thumbs up pose then as well

Didn't buy either.

I like the good old fashioned pictures, simple and dull but I keep them rolled in a tube with a list of the names on the back of the pic (or as many names as the kids know!). DH had one class photo from his secondary and it was great when catching up with friends to have all the names on, brought back many memories for them.
Now, individual photos are a whole different game - we never buy them as they are universally shit! 2 of my DDs have actually been used as models so I know they are relatively photogenic, but goodness knows what happens in a school photo! I do have sympathy for the poor photographer having to take 600+ photos all identical, but surely a quick look on the camera screen these days would show you had a duff one that won't sell!

As a teacher I loathe this new style with a vengeance! There are so expensive, hard to store and just so staged. We used to have a lovely local photographer (who also took my class photos when I was small) who used to charge about £1 a picture, old school style, usually in the playground under a tree on a sunny day. They sold in droves because they were cheap and families bought loads of copies to send to relatives. Now hardly anyone buys them and the worst bit is, that as a teacher, you can't hide behind the children if you're feeling less than slim that year!

Bleugh, yes. I hate the aesthetic of these photos. The white background makes the colours look bright and naff. They do them at my DS nursery, but apparently the hell carries on to primary school?

The photographer at my DS nursery is obsessed with feet. Every photo by him is my DS on a fur rug, with his bare feet right at the centre of the photo. The way the perspective works makes it look like my DS has one giant foot!

They did an xmas themed shoot so they could squeeze more money out the parents offer personalised xmas cards we could annoy relatives with. My DS was standing bare foot in fake snow, next to toy rudolph, wearing a t-shirt (his nursery is boiling hot). It looked stupid.

I think they do the small group photos because it's easier to get a photo where no one is blinking. If you have a large group someone will almost certainly blink when they take the picture.

The new ones are desperate, so fake too! All that white backgrounds and shite focus. Most of these photographers use an auto setting. Flat lifeless images so they try to perk them up by getting them doing "quirky" things. It's like a horror film. Everything is just too contrived, so i'm looking for something awful!

I actually liked the contemporary ones of my kids' classes this year and bought them - having six groups of kids/TAs/teachers means everyone is smiling or at least not looking gormless, as opposed to the class ones where you would have to choose the one where your child was looking less idiotic.

Plan to buy another set in a couple years time and re-use the frames. :) Ds likes all his classmates and dd was fascinated to see all the other nursery kids and has told me who they all are, so figured might as well.

The individual shots are 50:50 as to whether they look good. This year ds was in a foul mood and the preview is hysterical - he looks like he's about to order the planet to be destroyed!

Never heard of these new style ones. Our primary still does the traditional sitting / standing in rows in school uniform, which sell really well and raise a lot of money for the PTA. I always buy the whole class ones - it's lovely to see how their classmates change with time. The ones I don't get are the individual ones ( Wrates etc) - why do I want an overpriced photo of my child in school uniform when I could so easily take one myself?

Crowy that made me sob with laughter. The traditional 70's catalogue pose, "stop that man he's run off with my pants" (I think it was Alan Davies who said that).

DD's school do them too. They don't give out class lists so I buy the one with the names on for information. They don't have props in them, but I laughed when I saw it because I don't think they did her teacher any favours with the pose this year.

The individual photos will be done shortly, they are far more traditional thankfully.

DD's school have done themed photos by class for a calendar once, that was quite funny. But the themes were aimed at the month they were representing, not random pirates in a class photo!

I don't really care about having school photos. I have enough pictures of my kids to be able to remember what they looked like at various ages/stages and I never remember to display the wretched school pictures anyway. I think I also don't like them much because my mum always made me have them taken in case I was murdered and the police needed a photo to put on the news. Not a great association!

If I must have them (and the kids look at me like I tried to sell them as slaves if I don't) then I prefer the more formal, individual ones. I don't think our local primary school does class photos, just the individual ones or sibling groups. I have plenty of pictures of my boys messing about, I don't need more.

When I was at school we had a huge school photo taken and I was right at the back, on a very narrow scaffolding plank, about 10 feet from the ground(there was no railing behind me and I was petrified!). There were 400 girls in the photo and it took about an hour. By the time I was allowed down I was in such a state that I had to be helped down and I couldn't stop shaking for ages.

YANBU!

Class photos (and, now I come to think of it, individual ones too) only happen up to Y3 in DC's school - beyond that we just get fleeced for team photos instead. Team photos are very traditionally posed - but for the class ones the photographer tends to get carried away with the setting and have them posed in/around a tree, or a field gate, or whatever - but at least they are all physically there at the same time - no photoshopping involved. I think I would draw the line at photoshopped groups (or props, FGS!)

Individual photos were the white background style ones one year, but actually they dragged DS in to DD's ones and achieved the impossible in getting nice photos of both my DC together, so I was forced to spend a small fortune buy some

I quite like the new ones as they're more fun, especially more relevant to a group of 5year olds, and you've got a better chance of getting 5 kids at a time smiling than 30. But ours have screwed up the sizing this year because there are two extremely tall kids in one pic, and the nex door pic has a regular sized child who looks the same height as the big ones. And the poor child in the same group as the tall ones looks like a midget.

One one of ds's the kids are just hovering on a plain white background. I assume it has had the background photoshopped out and that they were in fact standing on the floor rather than suspended on wires or flying. They're disabled kids - some in wheelchairs so they certainly weren't jumping!