How we handle your information.

J.L. Wiswell Photography · Last updated: September 25, 2026 · Terms of Use

On this page

01Who we are and what this covers
02Information you give us
03Information collected automatically
04How we use your information
05How we use AI
06How we share information
07Cookies and analytics
08Email, texting and calls
09Photographs, minors and portfolio use
10How long we keep information
11Security
12Your choices and rights
13Links to other services
14Visitors outside the United States
15Changes to this policy
16Contact

01Who we are and what this covers#

J.L. Wiswell Photography (“we,” “us,” “our”) is a portrait studio based in Onalaska, Wisconsin, serving La Crosse and the surrounding region. This policy covers jlwiswell.com, the client galleries and print store hosted for us by Pic-Time at gallery.jlwiswell.com, our inquiry forms and Senior Style Quiz, and the emails, calls and texts we exchange with you about our work. It also explains how we handle the photographs we make.

When you book a session, your client agreement adds specific terms about your images, the release for portfolio use, payment and delivery. If this policy and your client agreement ever differ on those points, the client agreement controls.

This policy does not cover other companies’ websites or apps, including the social platforms we link to. Their own policies apply there.

02Information you give us#

Inquiries. Your name, email, phone number, the kind of session you are considering, how you found us, and anything you write in your message. If you are a parent inquiring about senior portraits, we ask for your son’s or daughter’s first and last name so we can refer to them properly. Some forms ask a light planning question or two, such as a favorite vacation.
Senior Style Quiz. Your answers, and the name and email you enter so we can send your result.
Booking and payment. When you reserve a date through our booking system, we collect what the session, agreement and invoice need: names, contact details, the session date, a delivery address and payment records. Card payments are processed by Stripe; we see a confirmation and the last digits of the card, never the full number. We also accept Venmo and checks.
Galleries and print orders. Pic-Time handles gallery access and print orders from a gallery or our art store; card payments for prints are processed by Stripe through our own account.
Conversations and planning. Emails, texts, call notes, planning-call details, wardrobe and location preferences, and anything else you tell us to make the session yours.
Reviews. What you write to us, or post publicly, about your experience.
Photographs. The images we make at your session are personal information about the people in them, and we treat them that way.

03Information collected automatically#

Like most websites, ours records technical data as you browse: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, the page that sent you here, the date and time, and the approximate region your IP address suggests. When you submit a form, our system also records the page you were on, your device type and the time, and holds your IP address briefly to stop spam and repeated submissions. The cookies and analytics tools involved are described below.

04How we use your information#

To answer your inquiry, check availability and send the pricing and information you asked for.
To plan, book, photograph, retouch, present and deliver your session, wall art, albums and prints.
To invoice you and keep accurate business, accounting and tax records.
To send our own emails about our work, the season and occasional offers when you have inquired, taken the quiz or opted in. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link.
To call or text you when you have given us your number, as described under Email, texting and calls.
To show our work on this site, on social media, in award entries and printed samples, and in our advertising, under the release in your client agreement.
To understand and improve the site and our process: which pages and guides help, where the site is slow, what people search for.
To protect the studio and our clients: spam prevention, security, fraud detection and enforcing our terms.
To meet legal obligations, respond to lawful requests and establish or defend legal claims.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects.

05How we use AI#

Randolph. When you send an inquiry, the first reply usually comes from Randolph, our AI assistant. Randolph reads what you wrote and drafts a short, relevant response so you hear back quickly even when Jeff is on shift in the emergency room. Randolph tells you it is an AI assistant in that email, and if you ask, it says so plainly. We read every inquiry ourselves and follow up personally. To draft that reply, your inquiry is processed by our automation platform (Make) and our AI provider (Anthropic) for that purpose only. Our AI provider does not use your inquiry to train its models. We keep a record of what was sent to you so a later conversation can pick up where the last one left off.

Quiz results. The Senior Style Quiz uses the same kind of AI to turn your answers into a personal result email.

Editing. We use third-party editing software, including AI-assisted tools, for finishing work on portraits: skin, blemishes, stray hairs, a light stand at the edge of the frame. Expressions and the moment stay as they happened. These providers process images under their own terms.

Our own writing. We may use AI tools to help draft blog posts, captions and emails. A person reviews what goes out under our name.

07Cookies and analytics#

Cookies are small files a site stores in your browser. Ours fall into three groups.

Essential. The security check on our forms (Cloudflare Turnstile or Google reCAPTCHA), caching and performance (WP Rocket and Cloudflare), and remembering that you have closed a notice. The site does not work properly without these.
Analytics. Google Analytics 4 tells us how people find and move through the site and records a “lead” event when a form is sent, with no name or email attached. Microsoft Clarity gives us heatmaps and session replays that mask typed text by default. Metricool counts page views for our social planning tool. These tools set their own cookies and may receive your IP address and device data. We use them to understand the site, not to advertise to you elsewhere.
Media and fonts. Films on our pages load from Vimeo when you press play, and Vimeo may set its own cookies. Some type is loaded from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address when the font is fetched.

Your choices. Your browser lets you block or delete cookies; blocking essential cookies may stop the forms from working. Google offers a browser add-on that stops Google Analytics from collecting data on any site: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Microsoft describes Clarity’s data practices at privacy.microsoft.com.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. We treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a request to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information. Because we do neither, honoring it changes nothing about how the site behaves. There is no settled standard for Do Not Track signals, and we do not respond to them beyond what is described here.

08Email, texting and calls#

Email. If you inquire, take the quiz or book with us, we may email you about your inquiry, your session and our work. Marketing emails carry an unsubscribe link, and we process unsubscribe requests within ten business days. Emails that are part of doing business with you, such as the reply to your inquiry, your agreement, your invoice and your gallery link, continue as needed.

Texting. If you give us your mobile number, you agree that we may call or text you about your inquiry, session, gallery or order. Most texts come from our own phone; some, such as a confirmation or reminder, may be sent by an automated service. We will send marketing texts only if you separately opt in. Message frequency varies and message and data rates may apply. For any automated text, reply STOP at any time to stop receiving them and reply HELP for help; you can also email [email protected] or simply tell us. Agreeing to texts is never a condition of booking a session. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

Calls. We may call the number you give us about your inquiry or session. We do not cold-call and we do not buy contact lists.

09Photographs, minors and portfolio use#

The images we make. Our photographs are our copyrighted work. How you may use your own portraits is set out in your client agreement and print release. We show our work publicly on this site, on social media, in award entries and print competitions, in studio samples and vendor features, and in our advertising, only under the release in the client agreement you sign. You may decline the release or limit it when you book; tell us and we will note it on your file.

Changing your mind. Email us and we will remove the image from our website and our own social accounts within a reasonable time, generally thirty days. We cannot recall pieces already printed, entered in a competition, published by a third party or shared onward by others, and copies may remain in backups for a period before they cycle out.

Children under 13. This site is written for adults and teenagers and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information online from a child under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has sent us information, email us and we will delete it. Family sessions that include young children are booked by, and released by, a parent or guardian.

Teenagers 13 to 17. Most of our senior clients are minors. We usually hear about a session first from a parent or guardian, and a parent or guardian signs the client agreement and any release. When a student contacts us about their own session, we reply to them directly, the same way we would any client, and we bring a parent or guardian in for booking, payment and agreements.

Names and schools. With a parent’s permission we may mention a student’s first name, school and class year alongside their portraits. We do not publish the ages or last names of students or family-session clients. Adult clients, such as couples and headshot clients, may be credited by full name with their permission.

Reviews. If you post a review publicly or send one to us, we may quote it on this site and in our materials with your first name and last initial, or as you posted it. Ask and we will remove it.

10How long we keep information#

We keep information for as long as it serves the purpose we collected it for, and then for as long as the law or a legitimate business need requires. In practice:

Inquiries. Kept while they are useful for responding to you and recognizing you if you return, then deleted or anonymized.
Client records, agreements and invoices. Kept for the life of our relationship and for the period tax, accounting and legal obligations require, generally seven years for financial records.
Photographs. We may retain original and finished files indefinitely for our archive and so you can reorder, subject to your client agreement and your right to ask us to stop using an image publicly. Ask and we will delete your files where that is feasible, apart from records we must keep and products already made.
Email list. Until you unsubscribe, or until we prune contacts who have not opened anything for an extended period.
Analytics. Retained according to our Google Analytics settings and each provider’s own retention period.
Security data. IP addresses held for spam and rate limiting are kept for hours to days.

11Security#

We use reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards for the information we hold: the site runs over HTTPS behind Cloudflare, access is limited to the two of us and the providers named above, our accounts use strong passwords and two-factor authentication where it is offered, the computers and drives that hold client files are encrypted, and we keep backups. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute security. If a security incident affects your personal information, we will notify you as Wisconsin’s breach notification law (Wis. Stat. § 134.98) and any other applicable law require.

12Your choices and rights#

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

tell you what personal information we hold about you and send you a copy in a usable format;
correct information that is wrong or out of date;
delete your information;
stop marketing emails or texts;
stop using a photograph of you or your family publicly.

How to ask. Email [email protected] from the address we have on file, or call 608-279-8095. We may ask you to confirm details of your inquiry or session so we know the request is yours. You may send a request through someone you have authorized in writing. We aim to respond within forty-five days and will tell you if we need longer. We will never treat you differently for making a request.

What we may keep. We may decline the part of a request that would require us to delete records we are required to keep, such as agreements and tax records, or images that are part of a completed order, and we will tell you why.

State privacy laws. A number of states, including California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas and Oregon, have comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Those laws generally apply to businesses that handle personal information about very large numbers of residents or earn revenue from selling it, and a studio our size generally falls below their thresholds. We extend the choices above to everyone regardless. If a state law does apply to you and you believe we have not honored it, you may also contact your state’s attorney general.

Wisconsin. Wisconsin does not currently have a comprehensive consumer privacy law. We follow Wisconsin’s breach notification law and its right-of-privacy law, which requires written consent before a person’s name or likeness is used for advertising or trade. That consent is the release in your client agreement.

13Links to other services#

The site links to services we do not control: our Pic-Time galleries and art store, our Dubsado booking pages, Vimeo, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Google Maps and the schools, venues and vendors we recommend in our guides. Each has its own privacy policy, and this one stops where theirs begins.

14Visitors outside the United States#

We are a United States business and our providers process information in the United States. Our services are offered to people in the United States. If you visit from elsewhere, you understand that your information will be handled here under this policy and United States law.

15Changes to this policy#

We update this policy when our practices or the law change, and post the new version here with a new date at the top. For changes that meaningfully affect how we use information we already hold about clients, we will also give notice on the site or by email where that is practical. Using the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.

16Contact#

J.L. Wiswell Photography
3040 Wild Rose Lane
Onalaska, Wisconsin 54650
[email protected]
608-279-8095