UPDATE: minutes after my original post, I received a long email from Jason where he apologized for the transportation mix up. Overall I'd say Jason is an extremely sincere person that's very easy to talk to, except unfortunately I'm not receiving the level of professionalism and preparation that I felt that I have paid for.
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My (current) wife and I get married in July and we hired Jason as our photographer. The overall quality of the picture is very subpar, and the level of preparation and follow-up post the photoshoot has been disappointing.
Jason and us met up in a coffee shop in Kirkland where the main goal was trying to get to know each other and prepare for the big day. The meet-up was very cool as Jason was extremely friendly, easy to talk to and seems to be very committed. During the meet-up, we talked about the transportation(Jason agreed to pick us up using his SUV for the day, since parking would be a huge pain if we were driving two cards and we really don't want to waste any time looking for parking). We also talked about a few potential places and Jason mentioned he's going to do some research about the spots we've talked about. My wife and I left the meeting feeling great.
If you think the actual day went as smooth as the meet up, then you would be disappointed. Firstly, Jason showed up on his 4 seater that I can barely fit in (not to mention my wife with her dress), and when asked he insisted on we've never talked about his SUV -- this is pretty ridiculous... how would we have known he has an SUV if we didn't talk about it. So my wife and I had to ended up calling one of our friends to drive us around following Jason's car (since they also only have a small van). We ended up spending 20 minutes looking for parking, and looking for each other in the Highway park (which is very, very easily lost if you've never been there).
Aside from the empty promise on the transportation, Jason also didn't do any research like he has promised. On the day of wedding, he came in not prepared and asked us for location, route, etc. My wife and I were extremely disappointed because of all those empty promise.
As far as the photoshoot itself goes, it was cut-short to around 3.5 hours from 5 hours due to the lack of planning. However from the pure photography standpoint, the photos are not dazzling. The layout was quite poor( there are many photos taken in a strange angle where our legs look much much shorter than in real life, and plenty of times my head got cut-out by the top of the photo). As far as the detail goes, Jason didn't even both clear up the hairs on the brides face as he simply let the hair flying around, nor did he bother giving any instruction around posture, emotion, etc. The entire photoshoot felt pretty single-directional instead of the bi-directional feedback my wife and I had expected.
Another very disappointing part of the lack of follow-up after the photoshoot. Jason promised the photo was going to take 4-6 weeks, and it actually ended up taking more than 8 weeks. Additionally, Jason initially promised to make 'photoshop adjustment' as part of the original package, and ended up requesting $15 per photo to simply remove a piece of hair out of the bride's face. This is pretty outrages charge given it literarily took me 5 minutes in photoshop as a first-timer.
Lastly -- when sending our feedback to Jason, here's his response: "I will be responding to your email in the next day or so. Just wanted you to know I haven't forgotten about you, or ignored your emails. I do have some thoughts of my own that I'd like to share.". Yet it has been almost 2 weeks we still haven't back. This type of empty promises is truly reflected throughout our entire experience with Jason.
Overall:
- Planning: terrible
- Level of effort: bad
- Photo skills: Mediocre. There were around 10 nice shots out of 500+ photos, and there are plenty of rookie mistakes (I consider myself an beginner/intermediate photographer and I can easily identify the issues in the layout, brightness and attention to detail)
- Senses of responsibility: poor. read more