Earlier this year my fiancé and I hired Pink Rae Photography to do our engagement and wedding photos. I heard good things about her work, in fact she was recommended to me by one of our vendors. The moment we met her though we got the sense that she had an attitude of being hot stuff and no one would dare say something negative about her.
I cried when I first saw our engagement photos because I hated them so much. They just were not up to standards that what she charges would suggest. No one else that I showed them to was impressed with them either. We tried to work with her, we politely and professionally explain our displeasure and gave her a chance to make things right. She acted completely flabbergasted that we didn't LOVE the photos, she never gave us an apology at ALL, which was the least she could have done, and eventually she just dropped us as clients 3 1/2 months before our wedding.
Sarah Miller (owner of Pink Rae) mentioned how she had never shot at any of the locations aside from the railroad tracks and that she would probably not shoot at them again. She asked us as soon as we arrived for our session where else we would like to shoot at besides the theater. These locations were chosen seemingly last minute yet she claimed to put in a lot of time and planning for the shoot. She was so vain she didn't even have a contingency plan in the event that someone was unsatisfied with her work.
She told us that she loved the images and thought our session was complete. But since these were to be OUR photos not HER photos I really could care less how satisfied SHE was with them. As the client and at the price she charges it was within our rights to speak up when we were displeased with what we saw.
In most of the photos we were posed in a way that was unflattering or awkward. We looked uncomfortable or strained and she had us kiss (in a way that looked like we were making out) in way too many of the photos. Our main goal with speaking up was to either have a re-shoot or to have the amount that she charges taken off the total price we were paying her and for her to listen to what we were saying so the same thing did not happen to our wedding photos. Her response in the end was just to refund our total amount and let us go without a photographer. In one message she told us, "I have NEVER refunded even part of a deposit to a bride and groom" and then a little later in the same message she said, "I would normally have taken the engagement fee out this deposit." How can she say what she would normally do if she has never done it before?
Overall in my dealings with her, I found Sarah Miller of Pink Rae to be vain, contradictory, immature, and unprofessional. I would not recommend her services to anyone.
(Background Info: We shot our engagement photos in the theater on Silver Springs Blvd, some in downtown Ocala, and at some railroad tracks. While mentioning the theater I would like to say that originally we were supposed to shoot in the Marion Theater in downtown Ocala but they were having an event there the night of our shoot which she didn't know about until the day before our planned shoot. We had to downgrade to the other theater because of this. We were okay with it at the time only because there was nothing we could do about it. Another mistake on her behalf.) read more