I hear that every bride has one horror story when it comes to her wedding, so hopefully this will…read morebe my only one.
Mrs. Crawford has some nice photos on her website, so I took a gamble when hiring her even though I could not find any reviews online. We exchanged a dozen e-mails, and I sent her a $200 deposit, which she immediately cashed. The first problem we encountered was in November when she stood us up for our shoot. I took unpaid time off work to leave early, I got a manicure, and my fiance and I waited around for half an hour for her in our fancy clothes at American Tobacco. We call her, and she claimed to have not gotten the last 2 e-mails I sent her confirming the date (one several weeks before, and the other the night before). Her reasoning was that she "installed a new spam filter". Judging by the fact that she has a gmail account, and we already had a dozen emails establishing contact, I find this unlikely. Her apology was lackluster, but two days later she offered us a free 11X17 canvas to make up for her mistake. Since she already had my deposit, I went ahead and rescheduled with her.
She took a long time to respond to e-mails, so I gave up on the hopes that we'd be able to use our engagement pictures for our Save the Date cards, and told her I'd be willing to wait until her holidays settled down and we'd do it in January (in hindsight, I don't know what I was so accommodating as a paying customer!). She actually showed up at our appointment at the end of January. As fate would have it, the weather was not as good as our original date, and of course I was having a bad hair day. ;o) She just wasn't professional. I know a bit about photography, and really hoped she wasn't just one of those people who buys a DSLR and starts a photography business, but that's basically all she is. Granted, she has a more expensive Canon that most of those other people, but that's where the "professionalism" ends. She kept asking us if we had any ideas for poses, which we didn't, and were depending on our "professional photographer" for. I had asked to do one outfit at American Tobacco and the other outfit in a field. We had discussed this before, and she said she knew of a place. However, when we changed outfits, she just took us back to American Tobacco. It was so awkward at this point, that I didn't have the heart to protest. We left with far fewer shots than I had expected, and what was supposed to be a 2 hour session was done in just over an hour...including the time it took both of us to change.
And now the kicker. She doesn't send the proofs when she said she would (2 1/2 weeks). I e-mail her at 3 weeks, and she promises me she'll get them to me that weekend. Three days after she promised, they come in. And the proofs just really were not good. There were three pictures that I loved...and the rest I will never do anything with. Not even print them at a drugstore. For example, she applied what looked like a golden filter to one picture--which made my hair look lovely--but turned our teeth yellow. And that was the final image she submitted! Really? More than half had bad expressions, or my hair was placed awkwardly (things that other photographers take care of before they take the shot). I was so disappointed with the options she gave us, I asked to buy the whole CD of images, hoping I'd be able to salvage our shoot and find some others that I liked better, and I would just touch them up myself. Well, $300 later, and a CD shows up with only the 19 proofs. I immediately contact her, and after some more delays, she claims that problems with her new "photo sorting software" caused her to lose all of our pictures, and she only has thumbnails left. She refunded part of my money. She sent a much smaller canvas than the 11X17 she promised after I pressed her on it. And I'm left with 3 usable pictures. I didn't get to use our engagement photos for our save the dates. I don't have enough to make a photo book out of to use as our guest book. So it really was worthless. I started to file a claim with my credit card company, but her e-mail response of "what? you were unhappy?" made me just want to cut ties and not deal with this person anymore.
Avoid at all costs!
