Anyone have any experiences with Dreams Studio to share? Contemplating for an upcoming cruise

[supaflyrobby]

Normally I would not bother but our cruise in July is for our 5th wedding anniversary and our 3 year old will be joining us as well. My mother was complaining the other day that we have not had any professional photos taken of us since right after our daughter was born. Since we will be dressed to the 9's for elegant night anyway, I figured this might be a golden opportunity. Pre cruise packages range in price from 300 to 750. Worth the extra money? 

[sanmarcosman]

Not worth it in our opinion. They'll take more of your vacation time giving you the hard sell in a small room to buy the whole array of photos placed before you. Dress the family up for elegant night. Stop at as many photo ops as you like and then choose from those photos. 

[StephPS79]

Just had our wedding on a ship, and a photographer was included, but purchase of the photos was an additional charge.  Here are my thoughts...

 

I didn't expect the photos to be great, based on what you see from the photos around the ship.  I was however, pleasantly surprised.  Not the greatest work I've ever seen, but also a lot better than I anticipated.  We actually passed on the photos after the ceremony, because we didn't think they would be that great or that we would purchase any, and quite frankly, we were over getting photographed at that point.  However, after seeing the photos, I regretted not doing so.

 

I'll partly agree with sanmarcosman above, you do spend some time in a small room where they give you a hard push.  But I didn't think it was too much time, overall process took about 45 minutes.  And didn't feel too pressured.  The only time was when we were like, well, we'll just take the digitals, and then was offered a "deal" for a package with the less than listed prices.  For record, we did then end up purchasing one of the "reduced" packages.  Still not cheap.  But what we got was nice quality.

 

I would 100% say though the quality of what we received was far superior to what the photogs around the ship produce on elegant night, or any other shipboard stop.

[Jeafl]

1 hour ago, sanmarcosman said:

Not worth it in our opinion. They'll take more of your vacation time giving you the hard sell in a small room to buy the whole array of photos placed before you. Dress the family up for elegant night. Stop at as many photo ops as you like and then choose from those photos. 

I completely agree.  We accidentally took some photos through Dreams one formal night (we just saw a plain black background and the photographer never mentioned he was from Dreams).  You had to make an appointment to look at the pictures, and once there we were told you had to buy all of them or nothing.  We just wanted one 8 x 10 and they refused to sell it to us.  So we walked, and the photographer was very snotty with us.

 

It also annoyed me that we got MANY text messages and voicemails in our room reminding us to show up at our appointment.

[SAM527]

We were walking by Pixels last month on the Legend heading down the stairs to the lobby and a photographer told us to take some photos with another photographer, we weren't wanting to but agreed not knowing what we were getting into.

At the end he asks us about an appt the next day, I was like appt, what appt??...to be honest I didn't even know Carnival had this or I would have been ready to say no at the beginning.

Next day we're in this little room and see a nice slide show with music, then he hands us an album. We liked a couple of the prints but that was it, then we were told prices and a price sheet was put in front of us with prices as high as a cheap used car. 

The lowest he would go was 5 prints for $199 but we didn't want that many, even if we found 5 prints we couldn't figure out what to do with them, can't display all of them.. or put them in an album no one will look at. So we told him sorry but no. 

When we saw him after that he wouldn't look at us or would walk away.

[dropbackandpunt]

We stumbled into this without knowing what it was in 2019 as well but ended up being pleasantly surprised.  Our kids ranged from ages 5 to 16 at the time and the pictures were really good.  We were floored by the price quote for everything but ending up settling on a package that included our favorites at a price that we found acceptable.  The pictures were definitely better than all the others we had done previously while walking around the ship on any other cruise we've done but YMMV.  We have talked about doing it again in the future at a port to take advantage of a tropical background so for us it was a positive experience. 

[mmtska]

We did this last year for our 15th anniversary. We were asked if we wanted to do a photo shoot and said sure why not. Yeah it was expensive, but we got the photo book, digital copies of several photos and fancy printed copies of some of the photos and I felt it was worth it. Both sets of parents were so excited for new photos, and I love our photo book more than our wedding album. The book I wanted was $1100, but I wasn't paying for that so we got a smaller one. It was all about $800. Yes it took some time, but I don't think my husband and I have ever looked so good in photos lol. Plus we got an amazing sunset photo of us, and I cant get that reality in a store.