Cannot get over this!

Loooong story. So my SIL decided to text us all and get our opinion on doing a family picture now that there's a bunch of us who have gotten married and had kids - the family has grown. She wanted to do it as a surprise for my mother and father in law for their anniversary and we all thought that sounded really nice. So she goes on to say it'll be $475 for the photographer she picked (who does her/her husband's family photos) and asks us all if we split it 4 ways then the cost per couple would be $118. Everyone seemed okay with it but I checked with my husband and he was like "well we can make it work." We don't have a lot of money at the moment and I'm almost 7 months pregnant right now so we aren't trying to spend money unless we have had something planned and budgeted for. So we agree and move on with our lives.

So they're trying to pick a day and for some reason it's going to be this fall when we do it even though my parents in law anniversary is this spring. We settle on a day and then it comes out that the session is only an hour long and so one of the sisters, he, and I all go "woah that's $475 an hour for photos?" We all were kind of talking about how we figured we'd have more time for the price yadda yadda. Then it all blew up and everyone got mad. Even to the point of her husband texting us this mean long text saying we're unreasonable and telling us that that's what good photographers cost. It was also let slip that the SIL that suggested it is covering more than the specified amount to make it cost less for the group. So this photographer costs more than $475/hr to do family pictures --I don't know how much more. I politely asked if we are all going in on this that we should have the right to look into other options for photographers. I never get a response. I email our wedding photographer anyway and she said she would do it for $150/hr. I was like wow that's way more affordable. I loved our wedding photos and the gal is so sweet.

So today I get nudged about where we're at with the whole photo thing and I bring up the other photographer and her price and then I get a ton of push back from my SIL saying that their photographer is more experienced and they want someone they can trust and that's what we're paying for. They have the same exact style and same print release policy but one is so much more expensive. It made me feel bad like they didn't like our wedding photos either or thought our photographer wasn't good enough. I could not understand why she insisted on making everyone pay for the more expensive one when we all met my photographer at our wedding not even a year ago. She asked for my photographers website to go look and and in less than an hour I get a message from my other SIL that she's booking and paying the deposit and we are going with their photographer. I was so flabbergasted! I just up and told her that I felt so shut out and hurt because we didn't even get to talk about this as a group and that because we didn't get a chance to honestly be considered that we flat out aren't going to pay so the other SIL said she'd happily pay our portion. For us it wasn't about the money at this point it was that we were totally shut down. When the day comes and the individual family pictures are taken we will decline out of respect since we didn't pay and also because this was not handled like adults should have handled it.

I haven't been able to get it out of my head how insensitive they were about this. We are just starting out and are getting ready to have a baby and they wanna drop this big expense on us without any consideration for a less expensive option just because they want THEIR photographer. Ours is just as good and we all have worked with her at least once. Their photographer only they have worked with. I just felt like if they wanted the group to pay for it then we should all have had a say and discussed it but it was not considered.

Sorry for the long rant. This is driving me nuts.

Edit:: just for clarification the photo session includes a full extended family photo and then each individual family gets their own shots as well. We are declining the individual family shots as we will not pay for the entire shoot. We want to stand our ground that we were not considered so we will partake only in what's required. We also don't want to take any form of a hand out.