Photo Shoot

A few weeks ago I took Cora to a local chain photo studio called Studio Alice.  Studio Alice is a popular chain with many, many locations all over Japan (the website is all in Japanese).   It was fairly similar to a kid/family photo studio in the US but there are a few differences here and there.  

Studio Alice caters mainly to child photo shoots, but can accommodate taking portraits of entire families.  You can bring your child with their own regular dress clothes (suit, tie, frilly dress etc.) but a very popular thing to do is take your kid and dress them up in Studio Alice's elaborate costumes including fake hair and makeup if you so choose.  (It reminds me a bit of those old Glamour Shot setups that were so popular when I was in middle school.)  The costumes range from Disney princess dresses, Halloween-type characters and traditional Japanese kimonos.  As mentioned in my previous post, this is also a popular place to bring your child for their Shichi-Go-San photos.

Of course, I wanted to have Cora's photos taken in a little kimono because, well, when in Rome, right?  It's an opportunity that can't be passed up while we're here.  When they presented me with the options for fake hair I was so enormously entertained that I make the foolish mistake of letting them put some on her.  It was funny, but so not worth the time and effort.  If you're ever in the same situation, be smarter than me and don't try to put fake hair on a squirmy almost-two year old.  I was there with an American friend and we took some shots her kids while wearing the fake hair but none of them turned out so great.  Multiple tiny kids and elaborate fake hairdos?  I have no idea what we were thinking.  ;)

Disclaimer: Studio Alice doesn't allow you to take photos inside the store for obvious reasons but you can take video.  So the shots below are mostly stills from videos we took, which is why they aren't that great. 

I grabbed this shot of the walls of costumery that greets you when you walk in

The photos below are stills from when we were getting Cora ready.  You can see some of the fake hair if you look closely.  Note that my iPhone is the only thing keeping her still for the hair-fixing.  And in the dressing photo she is actively trying to run away.  Photo shoots are not her thing, unsurprisingly.

 Below she is waiting somewhat patiently in the play area.  The fake hair is blessedly gone by this point.

 And finally, below is the best shot we got.  All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.  Note that she isn't wearing shoes because she was having no part whatsoever of the matching geta, which are those Japanese-style wooden flip-flops.  It's also a little blurry but I'm going to tell everyone that it was an artistic choice and not because my kid won't sit still for more than five seconds at a time.  And as for what she is looking up at, it was me jumping around and singing off-key like an absolute idiot in an attempt to distract her into being still.  I have heard many interpretations of that expression but I know for a fact that she's thinking " OMG, Mama's lost her mind!".

After we took the photos we sat down to review them and pick a package.  The packaging and pricing was fairly comparable to what you would see in the US but they would not sell me digital copies now.  After one year I can go get them on a CD for a nominal fee.  Not a big fan of that but whatever.  So I took the copies they gave me and scanned them.

Although it was not the most relaxing day I've ever had, I'm really glad we did it and I know that one day far in the future we'll look at them and remember that crazy time when we lived in Japan.  :D