Matt photographed our wedding in July of 2010. He was terrific to work with throughout, relaxed and soft spoken yet able to direct family members and wedding guests about with a minimum of fuss and to coax smiles at potentially tense moments.

Matt's specialty is photojournalism. He excels at capturing the heartfelt expressions and moments of high emotion that run through all weddings. Best of all, he does it with an eye for artistic camera angles and the technical expertise required to shoot sharp, well-lit photos. As people who are quite picky about their photos, my husband and I were exceedingly happy with his coverage of our important day.

In addition, his prices are totally reasonable compared to most Bay Area photographers. You get a few hundred processed images ready to print, and a thousand or more images on CD within a few weeks of the wedding itself. Overall, he was a terrific choice for a critically important role in our wedding. Hire him yourself--you won't be sorry!

We couldn’t be more pleased with our wedding photos. Matt is superb at his specialty (photojournalistic style), capturing so many emotion-filled moments that otherwise would have passed us by. He is a total professional – we never got the sense that he was one of those photographers who was working weddings only until he gets hired by National Geographic. Compared to other photographers we interviewed, Matt did not seem over-the-top artsy (doing Photoshop edits on every other picture to create sepia-tone photos with just that one rose boutonniere in full color), and did not push us into buying albums (in fact, I don’t think he evens offers any). As far as we could tell, his sole emphasis seems to be getting beautiful photos -- people first and details second -- to tell your story. On top of it all, Matt was within our budget -- $3000 is not chump change for wedding photography, but certainly better than the $4000-5000 that seems to be mid-range in the Bay area. And he was just a great guy to work with – organized and experienced enough to know how to keep things moving along so you don’t have to worry about missing a particular photo op, serious about his job, but not above cracking jokes to put you at ease.

Our wedding day schedule was pretty tight, but Matt started right on time with the girls getting ready, then arrived ahead of us at the Stanford campus to scout out logistics of our portrait shoot (necessary to avoid colliding with all the other wedding parties –late June Saturday = peak wedding season).

Looking back at our Stanford photos, we are always amused at thinking about just how much work Matt had to do with military precision, lugging around his two big cameras while keeping a sense of humor the whole time and trying to get the guys to loosen up! For those of you who see the easy-breezy poses of wedding parties strolling down the street, or jumping up with arms over the heads, here’s a secret: the process of getting those shots is NOT easy-breezy. There is a lot of coordination, walking and talking back-and-forth, much like shooting a 5-second scene on a movie set, over and over again. Before the shoot, Matt literally gave us a 2-minute lesson on where each should be according to his orders of “Formation 1”, “Formation 2”, etc., and so then whenever we moved to a different location, we didn’t have to fumble and waste time figuring out where to stand. Not to say it felt like work, because we just had to listen and smile… All that said, the portraits came out great, with some fantastic close-ups, and I think that is a testament to Matt’s effectiveness at getting the wedding party to gel together, and to get the best out of everyone in an admittedly more formal atmosphere.

At the reception was where Matt really shone – we had less than an hour to get family photos during cocktails (between the ceremony and dinner reception), and Matt was formidable at rounding up the different parties and lining folks up, and moving on to the next set, all the while getting some great candids of guests. He finished with the posed photos a lot sooner than expected and offered to run through some more combinations (we had prepared two lists ahead of time – “must-haves” and the “nice-to-haves”), but we decided that a dozen or so of the must-haves were enough for us, as we preferred to be free from photos obligations so we could enjoy the company more.

Throughout the dinner and dancing, Matt went around and around the ballroom for the most comprehensive coverage. The entire night, from our entrance to the last dance, I never really noticed Matt’s presence, yet it was only when I first saw the hundreds of close-ups that he got of us – sitting at the table listening to speeches, getting our food, dancing, visiting other tables, cutting the crème brulee, and dancing some more – that I realized how he never stopped clicking away. That’s how unintrusive he was!

A month after the wedding, Matt mailed us a DVD with about 300 touched-up JPGs, and over 1000 more JPGs. All files were very high resolution. We have gotten so many compliments on the results – we just can’t thank Matt enough. Check out his many online albums of full wedding coverage – you’ll see what we mean!

Be careful. Maybe 2 stars is generous. I have been looking for a way to review Matt Kim since my daughter's wedding in San Francisco about 3 years ago. Glad I found Wedding Wire. Unfortunately, our experience wasn't everything the other reviewer wrote. To be fair, Matt does pretty good photojournalism, and we came out with some very nice shots. But overall, it was not a good experience. I wish I had hired the other guy.
Here are the problems:
1) Nearly all of the digital images he sent us on disc were very, very orange. We bought only digital images on disc from him since I create magazine albums myself. I think he was angry that he could not sell us the album. He was also contracted to edit 150 of the 750 images that he sold us. Even the 150 "edited" images he sent us had many that were still very orange. I literally spent months using various programs to get the colors adjusted on most of the 750 images. Still there were hundreds that were just unusable.
2) The images he sent us were not full resolution.
3) We contracted for 150 edited images and 600 unedited. He did not bother to do any color correction whatsoever on the 600. And they were very badly off-color. I cannot imagine a photographer sending out such poor quality work with his name on it.
4) We were not able to select any of the 150 edited images ourselves. They were all his choice alone. Of these, many featured the bride with her mouth wide open. Literally you could see the back of her throat. Once, again I think he was mad because he was not able to sell us any hard photos.
4) My other daughter had to set up the romantic bride & groom couple shots for him as well as all the group shots. He wasn't going to do any and told us that he didn't know how to. I understand photojournalism very well, but there has to be more to wedding photography than just candids.
5) He did not take even one family shot (just 6 of us) with me (the mother-of-the-bride) in it. I had to create a family group shot using Photo shop.
6) Pre- and post-wedding communication (mostly email, which is great for me) was very difficult, and it was difficult to get him to reply or respond. He was quite rude to me. I was the point person and the one paying for the package since my daughter and son-in-law were coming in from out of town.
7) He took an inordinate number of shots of "cute young things" who had no relation to either side of the family.
In the end, I was able to rescue many beautiful shots, and the bride and groom have a beautiful album that I created for them. However, it was very stressful over all. Someone without the editing skills and sophisticated programs we have would have not been able to salvage the wedding pictures, and coverage of the event would have been spotty at best.

After reading Mr. Kim's response, I stand by what I have written above. The main objection was the color of most of the pictures, which were extremely off-color. By the way, I create wedding albums professionally for clients and have never seen wedding photos as badly off-color. I was the client who hired Mr. Kim and paid him for my daughter's wedding. I never demanded the raw images, but asked to purchase them, since our agreement was only for jpg files and I find it easier to work with raw files in Photoshop. The other parents and the couple most certainly were not happy with the results. I did indeed have to create in Photoshop the only group shot that I had specifically asked for. There were many lovely shots, and I did create a beautiful album, which I sent him electronically as a gift, after editing the photos that he did not color correct. This was our experience, but I understand others have had more positive results.