Our Portrait Experience

It all started a couple of months back... i returned from Pune to find a letter with a voucher for a free studio session for my family with Venture Studios. I thought to myself i have never really had a professional photo shoot and this would be a good time for us to have our photos clicked - especially as we are notorious for having really ridiculous expressions in our photos and well to be brutally honest, end up with rather average looking photos (all three of us are prone to put on a camera face - have you seen Chandler's photo shoot experience on Friends). Now Venture says in its advertisements that its not just any other portrait photograph - but its an experience which results in a work of art that you will treasure - to tell you the truth i just thought it was a marketing tag line and was really skeptical about the whole thing - but freebies do entice me (as BMI advertises its loyalty program with - its the free ride that you enjoy the most). So we went for it.

So we booked an appointment for our session. The previous day, our photographer called us and got to know all about us and advised us on what would be good clothes to wear - what to avoid and had a brief chat, making me really comfortable. So we arrived at the studio the next day and were greeted by the right names and they made us feel so comfortable. We started our photo shoot and it was great. We had so much fun together, laughing, lying down, rolling onto our stomachs, with Mihir enjoying all the superman antics and we almost forgot that they were taking photographs at the time. I have never known an hour to pass by so quickly.

Once you have done the photo-shoot session, you then book a viewing session, where the photographer does some magic with the images and presents them to you on a large screen with lights all dimmed and some lovely music in the background - your own movie being played to you. And to say the least, this was an awesome experience. It did bring a tear to my eye to see the wonderful images - expressions captured in time - when you are having fun - letting your hair down - you don't know you are on camera and some truly fantastic moments with the most unbelievable expressions captured by the photographers lens - frozen in time on an image and with some creative magic presented to you - in the perfect setting. This was of course followed by the most difficult decision of all - which photographs did we want - and in what form. Well we had a budget - which i doubled on the spot - and ended up choosing three images - two for two sets of grandparents and one for us and in a deskframe format - this was the format that was most convenient for us - as we move houses here and in Pune. But they have some amazing frames and i know that there is one particular image that i am going to purchase sometime in the future once we have decided where we are going to be for the long term.

The images are then converted to a work of art (printed and framed) and are available to you in a couple of weeks. I just collected mine last week and they are really beautiful images - they look amazing and everytime we look at them, we have a smile. The true testimonial to this is the fact that my neighbour wants me to have her partner over, so that he can see the images for himself and then she is certain he will want to have a session done for themselves.

So you can have a look at their website - they are expanding globally and might soon come to your town and then well its an experience you shouldn't miss on. You can check out their website for more information - its http://www.thisisventure.co.uk

And for students of marketing and branding - this is one real cool branding story. I can now relate it to the hours spent with consumer behaviour and services marketing textbooks - to experience a live case study - its wonderful. I teaches you so much more than whats there in print. But i guess this aspect of it - will make for another post for some other time.