The Santa Claus at a mall in Edmonton, Canada has a serious case of the nasties. The guy hired to ho, ho, ho all day has started yelling at the parents who snap their own pictures of their kids on his lap instead of paying a $14 fee for a "basic picture package."
Santa says the parents who take their own pictures are basically shoplifting. Apparently he hasn't heard Santa's supposed to be the giving type.
"What message are you sending your children; 'Look Tommy and Sally, see what your parents stole you for Christmas'," Lyle Young told the Edmonton Sun.
Before you start thinking parents are somehow gypping the miserly Mr. Kringle, Young is paid a flat fee by the photography company that runs the mall Santa station. He gets paid whether parents pony up or not. And the mall's manager has said he'd be willing to pay a Santa to sit there and let parents take all the free pictures they want.
As a photographer, personally, I'm not big on the pictures you get when you sit down with Santa or any major character. The kids are stressed, the photographers are rarely trained, the lighting is terrible, and the photos look like you-know-what. Even the trained photographers don't have the same eye for my child that I do. I'm big on candid photos, where they spend the entire time coaxing the kids to "look at the camera" and "say cheese." You know what happens when my daughter says cheese? She closes her eyes and puts on the world's goofiest grin - it's the ham look developed after years of being tortured by her mother the photographer.
But even parents who don't care a fig about the artistry want that picture for something special. Usually, the store pictures are marked with a brand, so short of taking them home, scanning them in and working with special software to erase that mark, you can't reproduce the picture to send out to family or friends anyway. So taking one of your own is often the only way to get a picture that you can share, or a picture you can make in the right size for the frame you have in mind.
Then there's that money. Fourteen dollars may not sound like much to Lyle Young, but to a family that's out shopping with just a few dollars in their pockets, it can be a big dent in the budget. When their child sees Santa, however, should parents have to say, "sorry, honey, Santa charges too much?" Come on, he's Santa! And, according to the story in the Sun, the price of actually sitting on Santa's lap is free - there's nothing that says parents HAVE to pay. The photography studio running the booth has made its own mistake there.
Personally, I try to take my daughter out to see Santa when he's working for charity, where my fee for the crappy picture goes straight into the charity's coffers - and the "photographer" volunteering for the day is more than happy to let me shoot away.
Image: Root Cellar
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