The rules of a session, in plain words

These Terms & Conditions govern portrait and event photography services provided by Roel Tobias Portrait Studio (“the Studio”, “I”, “we”) at 504 W Pecan Blvd, Ste 120, McAllen, Texas, and the use of this website.

You accept them when you book a session — by confirming a date over WhatsApp, by paying a retainer, or by signing the session agreement — whichever happens first. If you book on behalf of a family, a group or a company, you confirm you are authorized to accept these terms for everyone who will appear in the photographs.

Every session also has a written quote and a session agreement with the specific details: date, session type, number of people, what is included and the price. If a quote or a signed agreement says something different from this page, the quote or the agreement wins for that booking.

Two languages, and doing this electronically

This page exists in English and in Spanish, and the two say the same thing. Read the one you are most comfortable in before you book, and ask me about anything that is not clear. If the two versions ever disagree on a detail, the English one governs.

Booking over WhatsApp, signing on a screen or confirming by message also means we agree to do business electronically. Under Texas law an electronic record and an electronic signature are as binding as ink on paper.

Pricing is quoted per session: it depends on how many people come and how many final images you take home. A date is not held by asking about it. The date is yours when the retainer is paid and I confirm it in writing.

The retainer is not a deposit against damage and it is not a down payment you can walk back: it pays for holding the date, turning away other bookings for that slot, and the planning before we shoot. It is non-refundable, and it is credited toward the total of your session.

Both of us agree, at the time of booking, that what a cancelled date actually costs a one-person studio is hard to calculate afterwards — the enquiries I turned away leave no receipt — and that the retainer is a fair and reasonable estimate of it, agreed in advance. It is not a penalty for changing your mind.

Session dates, times and prices quoted over WhatsApp, by phone or on this site are estimates until they are confirmed in writing. Prices shown on this site may change; the price in your written quote is the one that applies to your session.

The balance of the session is due on or before the day of the session, unless your written quote says otherwise. Products ordered afterwards — prints, albums, wall pieces, extra images — are paid in full before they go to the lab.

Galleries, files and orders are released once payment has cleared. If a payment is reversed, disputed or charged back after images have been delivered, the license to use those images is suspended until the balance is settled.

Prices are quoted before tax. Texas taxes photography: the session fee, the digital files, the prints and any expense billed on to you are all taxable, so sales tax at the rate in effect in McAllen is added to your invoice and shown as its own line.

Life happens, and a portrait studio that works with small children knows it better than most. Tell me as soon as you know: a date moved with notice is almost always a date I can fill, and one moved the same morning is not.

Rescheduling with reasonable advance notice moves your retainer to the new date, subject to availability. A session cancelled by you, or a session nobody shows up for, forfeits the retainer.

If you arrive late, we shoot what is left of your time: the session ends at its scheduled end so the family booked after you is not pushed back.

Outdoor sessions and weather. If the weather makes an outdoor session unsafe or unusable, we move it — that call is mine to make, and I would rather move it than hand you photos taken in bad light. Rain, heat and wind in the Rio Grande Valley are ordinary facts, not a breach by either of us.

Every session includes posing direction, a look at the shots as we go, and a digital gallery. The number of people included is the one on your quote; anyone beyond that is quoted before the session, not after.

I am the photographer for the session. Guests are welcome and phones are welcome for their own memories, but no one else photographs or films the setups I light and direct, and no one directs the subjects while I am working. It is not about ownership of the moment: children look at whoever is calling their name, and a session with three cameras produces three sets of half-good pictures.

No phones and no cameras in the changing area. Not mine, not yours, not a relative filming a story. The changing area has a door that closes, I never go in, and that rule holds for everyone in the room without exception.

The studio is a working room with lighting stands, cables and backdrops. Children stay under the supervision of the adult who brought them at all times. You are responsible for damage to equipment, props or the space caused by you, your children or your guests, and I may end a session — with no refund — if anyone is unsafe, intoxicated, or abusive toward me or anyone helping me.

Pets are welcome when they are agreed in advance. Sessions on private property or in venues that require permits or fees are your responsibility to arrange, and those fees are not included in the quote.

Most of what this studio does is family work, and that means most sessions include children. Two things follow, and neither is negotiable.

Only a parent or legal guardian can consent

A child cannot agree to be photographed or published; the adult with legal authority does it for them. When you book a session that includes a minor, you confirm that you are the parent or legal guardian of every child in it, or that you have the authority of one, and that no court order, custody arrangement or agreement with another parent prevents that child from being photographed or from appearing in the ways described in section 10.

If parents are separated or custody is shared, please tell me before the session. Where both parents can sign the release, I ask for both signatures — not out of suspicion, but because it is the one thing that keeps a decision about a child’s picture from becoming an argument between the two of you later. It is far easier to agree on what may be published beforehand than to unwind it afterwards.

And a permission given for a child is never permanent. A parent can withdraw it at any time, and the child, once they are an adult, can ask for their own image to come down without going back through their parents. That is section 11.

An adult stays with the child

A parent or the guardian who brought the child is present for the whole session and is responsible for the child at all times, including changing clothes, which happens in a private area and never in front of the camera. I do not photograph a minor without a responsible adult in the room, and I do not accept sessions where a minor is dropped off.

I will decline any request that sexualizes a minor or that puts a child in an unsafe position, regardless of who is asking or what is being paid, and I will end a session on the spot if that is where it is going. This is not a matter of taste.

Texas law requires any person who has reason to believe a child is being abused or neglected to report it to the authorities. I follow that duty, and no agreement with a client can override it.

Maternity, boudoir-adjacent and any session involving partial undress is for adults only, with the person being photographed fully in control of wardrobe, and a companion is always welcome in the room.

I select and edit the images that make the set. Editing includes color, contrast and light cleanup consistent with the style you can see across this website — that style is why you booked, and it is not negotiable per session.

Retouching beyond that — reshaping bodies, removing people, swapping heads between frames, composites — is extra work, quoted before it starts. I will say no to edits that misrepresent a child’s appearance.

RAW files, outtakes and unedited frames are not delivered, at any price. They are working material, the same way a chef’s prep is not the plate. What you receive are the finished images.

Finished images are delivered in an online gallery, ready within days of the session. The gallery stays open for a limited time, and the time is stated when I send it to you.

Download your files and back them up in at least two places on the day you receive them. The Studio is not your backup service: I keep files for a limited period after delivery as a courtesy, not as an obligation, and after that they are deleted. Recovering or re-uploading a gallery after it closes may carry a fee.

Screens differ. Colors on an uncalibrated phone or laptop will not match a professional print, which is why prints ordered through the Studio are matched and checked before they ship. Prints ordered elsewhere from your digital files are outside my control and outside any claim about color.

Under United States copyright law the photographer is the author of the photographs and owns the copyright from the moment the shutter closes. Booking a session buys the session and a license to the finished images — not the copyright. That is the standard arrangement in professional photography, and it is what lets a studio keep a portfolio at all. A portrait session is not a work made for hire, and nothing here transfers the copyright unless I sign a separate document that says so.

What your license covers

You get a perpetual, non-exclusive, non-transferable license for personal, non-commercial use: print them at any size, frame them, hang them, put them in albums and holiday cards, send them to family, and post them on your own social media accounts.

That license is also your print release. If a lab asks for written permission before printing professional work, this page is it — show them this section, or ask me for it on letterhead and you will have it the same day.

What it does not cover

• Selling the images, licensing them, or entering them in contests as your own work.
• Advertising a business with them — including your own — unless your quote says the session was a branding or commercial session, which is a different license and a different price.
• Handing the files to a third party to use for their own purposes: a school, a brand, an agency, a magazine, a stock site or an AI training set.
• Altering the finished images — applying filters, cropping, changing the color, adding text over them, or using them to train or generate anything. The edit is part of the work you paid for and it carries my name whether or not it is credited.

A credit — a tag on Instagram, a name under the picture — is never required but always appreciated, and it is how most families end up finding this studio.

A portrait studio is hired for work people can see. With your permission, images from your session may appear in my portfolio, this website, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, printed samples shown in the studio, submissions to photography publications, and paid advertising for the Studio itself.

That list is the whole list. A medium that is not named there is not covered, and if something new comes along — a platform that did not exist when you signed, a magazine feature, a billboard — I ask you again.

That permission is yours to give, and it is separate from the session. The session agreement carries a release you sign — or decline — and it has three plain choices:

• Yes. Images may be used as described above, adults and children alike.
• Adults only. No image in which a child is recognizable is published anywhere.
• No. Nothing from the session is published. Your photos are yours and the session stays private.

Saying no costs nothing and changes nothing about your price, your session or how I treat you. If you never sign a release, the answer is no: silence is not permission.

What I do even when the answer is yes

• Never publish a child’s full name, school, address, birth date or the location of a session at a home.
• Never geotag a private home or a school.
• Never sell or license your images to a stock library, an advertiser or a brand, and never hand them over for training artificial intelligence models.
• Never use an image in a way that could embarrass the person in it — no memes, no before-and-after body comparisons, no “what not to wear”.

What I cannot promise is control over what social platforms do with what is posted on them. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook grant themselves a broad license over anything uploaded to them, they may apply face grouping or recognition technology of their own, and anything posted publicly can be screenshotted or reshared by strangers. None of that is under my control, and no release from anybody can change it — which is the honest limit of this section and one more reason section 11 exists.

What is under my control, I use: the gallery I deliver your images through has face recognition turned off, your session is never tagged with a private address or a school, and I do not run any tool that groups my clients’ faces.

You can withdraw your permission at any time, for any reason, without explaining it. Write to me — WhatsApp, phone, or the form on the contact page — and say which image, or say all of them.

What happens then: I remove the image from this website, from my portfolio and from the Studio’s own social media accounts, and I stop using it in anything new. I do that promptly, and I do not ask you to justify it.

What I cannot do, and will not pretend to: recall printed samples already given out or published in a magazine, erase copies other people saved or reshared, or reach into platform archives and caches. A withdrawal works from here forward.

The reverse is also true: a permission you gave for one thing does not spread to another. Agreeing to appear in my portfolio is not agreeing to appear in an ad, and either of us can ask before something new is done with an image.

I work with professional equipment, two cameras, spare cards and backups on separate drives, and in years of work I have never lost a session. Cameras still fail, cards still corrupt and hard drives still die.

If images are lost, damaged or unusable for any reason — equipment failure, file corruption, loss in transit, or my own error — my responsibility is limited to reshooting the session, or to refunding what you paid for it. To the fullest extent Texas law allows, that is the whole remedy, and in no event does my liability exceed the total amount you paid for the session.

I am not responsible for consequential, incidental or indirect losses: a missed announcement date, a printed invitation, travel or wardrobe you bought for the session, lost income, or emotional distress. If your session is tied to something that cannot be repeated, tell me at booking and we will plan for it — that is a conversation, not a clause.

I am also not responsible for what people other than me do at a session: guests, venues, other vendors, or a child who is not being supervised. And an image posted publicly by you, or by anyone else, leaves my hands entirely.

And the limit has a limit. Texas gives consumers rights that cannot be signed away — the ones under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act among them. Nothing on this page waives those, nothing here is meant to, and if a court ever reads a sentence of mine as trying to, that sentence gives way and the rest of these terms stand.

If I cannot photograph your session because of illness, injury, an accident or an emergency, I will tell you as soon as I know, and I will do one of two things: move the session to the first date that works for you, or — if it cannot be moved — refund everything you have paid, retainer included.

Where a session cannot be moved and you agree, I may arrange for another professional photographer of similar standard to cover it. That is your choice to accept, never something imposed on you.

The same applies to things neither of us controls: severe weather, power failure at the studio, road closures, a public health order, or anything else beyond reasonable control. Neither of us is in breach; we reschedule.

You agree to cover me for claims that come from something you brought to the session: a permission you said you had and did not — over a child, over a person in the frame, over a location — property you did not have the right to use, or damage caused by you, your children or your guests.

In plain terms: if someone sues me because a child was photographed without the authority of whoever had to give it, and you told me you had that authority, that is on you.

Nothing here stops you from reviewing the Studio publicly, positively or negatively. There is no clause on this page that restricts an honest review or charges you for leaving one, and there will not be: contracts that gag customers are void under federal law, and offering one is itself illegal.

If something went wrong, I would rather hear it from you first and have the chance to fix it — that is an invitation, not a condition, and taking me up on it is not required before you say whatever you want in public.

Every photograph, text and design element on this site belongs to the Studio or is used with permission, and none of it may be copied, reposted or used to train a model without written consent.

Session descriptions on this site are exactly that — descriptions. They are not an offer that binds either of us until there is a written quote. I keep the site accurate, but I do not warrant that it is free of errors or always available.

Your privacy is covered separately, in the Privacy Notice.

These terms can change. The version that governs your session is the one published on the day you booked it, together with your written quote — a change made afterwards does not reach back into a booking already made.

The date at the top of this page says when it was last updated.

Talk to me first. Most problems in this business are a misunderstanding about what was included, and thirty days of good faith settles nearly all of them.

If thirty days of that gets us nowhere, the next step is mediation in Hidalgo County, Texas, with a mediator we both accept and the fee split between us. Most disputes of this size end there, and it costs a fraction of a lawsuit.

Neither of us gives up the courthouse. Either of us can take a claim to Justice Court — Texas small claims — where a case of this size belongs and where you do not need a lawyer to be heard. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. These terms, your written quote and your signed session agreement are the entire agreement between us and replace anything discussed beforehand. An agreement accepted electronically — a signature on a screen, a confirmation over WhatsApp — is as binding as one on paper.

Roel Tobias Portrait Studio
504 W Pecan Blvd, Ste 120, McAllen, TX 78501
(956) 683-5992

WhatsApp is the fastest way to reach the studio, and it is where most bookings happen. Anything about your data or a photograph you want taken down is in the Privacy Notice.