Some of the best pictures you'll take won't be in the places where the professional photographers are. In fact, the embarkation photo is one of the less magical ones, as it's just you and yours obliged to stand in front of a prop while you are chomping at the bit to get ON! The actual gangways just past the pro's embarkation set is way cooler, I think. JMHO. And there are so many other spots where I've never seen photographers (like the big red stack with the
DCL logo and the colored sailing flags).
We have never had a problem during character photo sessions asking the character "keeper" (not the pro photographer) to take the very same picture. We buy only the best professional ones after we check our own pictures to see how they came out.
No matter how busy our dining room servers were, they always seemed to have time to take some quick pictures, and the servers at Palo were great at that, too. And it was fun taking pictures WITh them in i!
We also occasionally dragged the tripod up on decks 5 and 10 at night when hardly anyone was around to get some leaning on the rail/smooching/Love Boat style pictures.
To me, some of our very best and most beloved cruise pictures were the candids or totally unplanned...like the night we were waiting to get on the elevator leaving Palo in formal gear and the elevator door opened and in it was...Goofy in a tux! We got a great impromptu photo that's one of our favorites. Keep your camera with you all the time, and watch out for those non-Kodak Picture Spots!!
