Composites
 

I need to know of a place to get composites done. I live in Chicago. Does anyone have any suggestions?

The entire Greek System at my school (8 houses total) uses Vantine Studios based out of Hamilton, NY (and we're in Kansas). They are a large composite company and they do a great job every year with our composites. Lots of different options to choose from, and you can even view your composite pictures online before the real thing arrives. They also come to your chapter house for the picture session.

www.vantineimaging.com

I am in South Carolina, and most of the orgs at my school use Vantine, too. They're pretty good, but it just takes 6 or 7 months to receive your completed composite.

OK this probably isn't much help, but I go to Mizzou and we too use Vantine studios. They usually do a pretty good job. :D

I'm in Wisconsin, and we also use Vantine...

As another option (in case you don't want to use the ubiquitous Vantine) is to check out who does your university's composites. We have our chapter comp. done by the campus photographer, who also does 3/4 of the college's comps. He's got our stole/shawl and a string of pearls so all we do is show up :D

We use Fraternal Composite Service, but they are a bunch of crackheads and we currently have not gotten our master composite from two years ago. Supposedly it's in the mail because our president called them and beasted them out, so hopefully......Vantine....are they good and not very expensive?

I know who you DONT want to go with...
Fraternal Composites

They lost two of our sisters pics, and when they supposedly found them, on the new composite... there were MEN from another organization on campus... Oiy. FINALLY we got it fixed.

Fraternal Composites Rant...
 

I'm in charge of the composite for my chapter, and Fraternal Composites is the WORST company ever.
We are currently in year 2 of a 3 year contract. They send us sitting times that were never approved by us, and are impossible to make. We got our composite we took last January in August. They got the names wrong on it eventhough we sent them a list. The photographer was mean, and offered us no times for make ups.
These people are terrible, and I definitely wouldnt go with them if I had a second chance

The only thing I didn't like about Vantine when we used them is the frames for the main composite kept getting bigger and more ornate, and I'm sure the prices did too. Maybe we just signed a cruddy deal (entirely possible) but look at things like that too. Does anyone know of a composite company that will let you frame your own? I'd think it would help to cut down costs a lot.

check out local photography studios -- we have used a few different local people in our area

all they do is use adobe photoshop -- i am starting to think i could do composites myself -- if i had a large format printer -- and if i had a great camera, oh yeah some photography skills would help too lol

but the last guy we used -- he took the pics on a digital camera and downloaded them onto his laptop -- he could even do touchups right then and there -- so if you didnt like your picture he could delete it and take another.

Contracts
 

I think the key to working with any composite company is negotiating the contract. Most of these companies want you to sign a two or three year contract. Unfortunately, once someone in your chapter signs the contract, you are locked in.

We have to have all of our contracts approved by someone at our Fraternity Headquarters so that they can help us read and interpret the fine print.

What I have found is that you can negotiate the contract. I was able to get a cancellation clause built into our 1 year contract that said that if we didn't have both the individual portraits of the women (the one's their parents ordered) as well as the composite for the chapter room by X date, I could cancel the contract completely.

It really held their feet to the fire, we got good service from them and they met the deadline.

DO NOT USE FRATERNAL COMPOSITES. We didn't recieve our 1999-2000 composite until 2001