As parents, we want to photograph every time our children break out in laughter, all the shared moments they have with their friends, their expressions when they feel excitement and joy – but, we’re busy. We’re trying to make those moments happen. Searching for your phone or camera to capture a candid moment hardly ever works in our favor. The moment is missed and the photo is blurry.

Enter: kandid.ly, a new service where you can hire local photographers to take pictures of your next birthday party, graduation, or any other event – for as low as $15/hour! Our general manager, Jamie Jett, hired a photographer using kandid.ly to take photos at her son’s birthday party. He wanted to have an “EPIC Capture the Flag” game for his 11th birthday, and she wanted to have some epic photos to prove how much fun it was. Here is her experience, and be sure to read to the end for a discount code!

My son, Dylan, wanted to bring in his 11th year by making a bunch of foam weapons so that him and all of his friends could run around the park like barbarians playing Capture the Flag. This idea was a huge win for me, because essentially, all I had to worry about was a cake (well, lemon bars for my little weirdo), some pizza, some decor, and supplies for the soft weapons. I haven’t planned this easy of a birthday party in years! With all that money I was saving, I decided that I wanted to try out a new service called kandid.ly so that, for once, I would have some great photos.

Kandid.ly is fairly new to Austin. It was started in Cincinnati and Austin is only the second city where you can take advantage of this amazing service. It works like this:

1. You create an account on kandid.ly
2. Search through photographers based on price, location and event type
3. Pick your favorite photographer
4. Request to book said photographer by clicking “BOOK ME!”  on their profile
5. They’ll respond if they are available
6. They’ll show up at your event
7. Kandid.ly will email you once the photos have been uploaded to your account (this takes 2-4 days)
8. From there, you can download them to your computer, your Cloud, Facebook, Flickr, Google Drive, OneDrive or Box
9. The photographer is paid through kandid.ly AFTER your photos are uploaded

The whole process was so easy! The site is very user friendly and I had zero issues in finding who I wanted at the price point I wanted. Theoretically, you can get photographers for as low as $15/hour – but I didn’t find any in Austin that were less than $20. Since I saved so much money on the party, I figured I’d splurge and picked Eddie M. as the photographer, who was $50/hour. The spend was justified to me because it was only a 2-hour party and I am the worst at taking pictures – so it very much felt like money well spent. With middle school starting next year, I figured it was time to really capture his elementary school life and get some awesome photos of all of the great friends he’s made, many of which will not be going to the same school as him next year.

Eddie showed up on time and ready to work on the day of the party. We introduced ourselves and then I pretty much let him do his thing. We didn’t really speak during the party, he was very busy following the kids around the park trying to get those action shots! I have to commend him because the kids had endless energy and it was a very hot and humid day. He kept up with all of them and the results are amazing. Honestly, they make me teary-eyed looking at them.

I would have never gotten pictures this good! Plus, the photographer was able to capture the sweet moments in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to. This is Dylan saying bye to his little sister. So sweet!

His sister joining in –

One of Dylan’s friends got him a tiara for a present. So, he wore it, because he’s awesome. This one is my personal favorite –

Another favorite –

There were 63 photos total and I’ve looked at them at least 10 times since I got them! And now, all of his friends have great photos too. Through kandid.ly, I could email a link to the album to all of the other parents whose kids were there and now they can have these memories as well.

I would highly recommend this service to other parents. The whole vibe of the party seemed more relaxed and no one had their phone out trying to get their next Instagram post.  I didn’t ever reach for my phone, not once! Instead, I hung out. I talked to the other parents and just enjoyed watching the kids play.

If you’re interested in checking out kandid.ly, they’re offering Do512 Family readers 10% off , just use the promo code DO512FAM10.

 
– J. Jett