Baby photos is the biggest scam out there. In my opinion the only one you'll always sucker into because, after all, it's pics of your kids and so there's a BIG emotional factor involved. Women are usually worse suckers for this, but men can be equally bad.

My advise: find a professional photographer which will agree to just do the shoot, and then provide you with the digital stills. This might take some searching, but trust me, you'll find one if you really look. Most of the photographers don't want to do this because they make the most money from the developed photos or posters. But the ones who do agree to do this are usually the better photographers anyway, because they make the most joy out of the photographing itself and not the editing and sales of the photo's afterwards.

We've worked like this for all the photo's of our youngest since her birth, after having learned from several other photo shoots we had done for our oldest. Usually the photos were nice, but we always felt scammed nonetheless because the price of the printed photos was always astronomical (compared to those online printing services - easily ten - tenty times as expensive!). They always tried to justify this by saying that the quality of the paper they used was better or some other reason, which is total BS. The truth is the only reason they only want to part with the digital negatives is because the are hoping you'll keep coming back for extra prints, at the same astronomical price of course.

I was particularly angry with the last photographer we used since she didn't even want to give me ONE digital still I wanted to put on the desktop of my pc. 'Out of principle'. Well, that was the last time we used her services as well, I can tell you. Also 'out of principle'.

That was the time we started looking for a professional photographer which would only do the shoot and then give us the digital originals. We've found one now, and are very happy with the service she's giving us. So happy even, we usually do a shoot with her now every three to four months. My wife now makes the digital photo books herself, by using one of those only photo software packages. The results are very good, almost as professional as the ones those other photographers made for us (which they only made for us because they wouldn't let us do it ourselves....)