We booked Aaron in October 2024 for our wedding in August 2025. We paid him £1,000, with a further £1,200 due a month before the wedding. In June 2025, I received an email from a woman named Natalie who said she was now our wedding photographer and had taken over Aaron's business "due to unforeseen circumstances". We specifically booked Aaron as he had been to our venue numerous times and it 's quite a large venue, so we wanted someone who knew their way around. When I spoke to Natalie, she told us she had never been to our venue before. When I asked her why Aaron wouldn't be able to photograph our wedding, she wouldn't tell us why.
I tried to contact Aaron multiple times with no response, it was only when we said that we didn't want Natalie to photograph our wedding that he got in contact with us. He told us that he had been diagnosed with a heart condition and had been hospitalised with pneumonia. He said he was passing his business to Natalie, but still wanted to photograph our wedding as it was "important to him". I believe he said this as we would have been within our right to a refund due to his sickness. Our contract stated we would be entitled to a refund if the photographer's sickness meant they couldn't attend.
My partner and I decided that it was too risky to have Aaron shoot for 10 hours in the August heat with his 'health condition', and given that we had paid for Aaron and not Natalie, we asked for our monies paid to be returned. This was when Aaron started to ignore us, and said that as we were the ones cancelling that he wouldn't give us our money back.
I reached out in some wedding groups on FB asking if anyone else had heard similar from him. Another bride and photographer reached out and let me know that Aaron had done the same thing to them. The bride was due to get married on the 8th of May, and Aaron told her 24 hours before her wedding that he was stuck in South America with food poisoning. He told her that a colleague would be photographing her wedding, someone he knew well. Speaking to the replacement photographer, she told me that Aaron found her details on the internet and booked her to replace him a week before the 8th of May. So whilst Aaron told us he was in hospital with a heart condition, he was also somehow half way across the world in South America with food poisoning. He also told the bride only 24 hours before her wedding, but knew a week before. He lied again about the replacement being a colleague. He has also never paid the replacement photographer for her work.
When I confronted Aaron with this, he never responded to me. I chased him numerous times, but to this day I've never heard from him or Natalie. read more
