Up through the day of the wedding we absolutely loved him as a photographer. He was fun, prepared, patient, really everything I wanted in a wedding photographer. He includes bridal portrait and engagement sessions in his packages which was awesome for us. His personality does make for a great wedding photographer.

After the wedding, we received our pictures over one month after he said he would have them done. He kept pushing the date back by another week at a time, and as a bride who is excited to see and share these pictures this was incredibly frustrating! We received 268 pictures and I would say about half of them are worth keeping. I was expecting 500-700 pictures since he was with us from about 1:00 pm-8:00 pm so I was disappointed in both the quantity and quality of what we received. Now we will make the best of what we have but since a wedding can't be recreated I would not recommend him to friends or family

My husband and I both really liked Michael when we first met him. He interviewed very well and has a nice portfolio on line. However, we were extremely disappointed in his service and the photos. On the day of the wedding, he was very scatter-brained, seemed to be having trouble with his equipment, and followed my husband's mother around, reminding her 5 times that she needed to provide him with the rest of the payment that night. When we got the digital proofs of the photos we were further disappointed. All of the photos of the ceremony were underexposed and un-usable, the cropping was awful, and there were no photos of my mother! I would not recommend his services.

Michael was our wedding photographer. We had to wait 81 days to see the photos. Some photos came out great (formals only), many were average or below average, quite a few were decidedly bad. We would not recommend him as a wedding photographer.

1) BEFORE THE WEDDING.
We planned the wedding remotely, so we found Michael online. He was a delight to talk to: funny, engaging, and seemed interested in getting to know us. We paid in full the day we found him. We met for our “engagement” session one day before the wedding. He forgot about that appointment, but luckily showed up at the studio at the time we arrived. He took several shots of us outside of his studio which resulted in 15 wonderful, yet very similar black-and-white portrait shots. As we talked about cameras I mentioned dropping my brand new D7000 and smashing the lens - Michael gave me a Nikon 18-35mm lens he said he didn’t need and was going to sell - as a gift. Wow.

2) THE WEDDING.
Michael showed up with his assistant up on time. During the wedding he was very professional and fun: he made people laugh and act natural for group photos; also, he was very good at getting people to be where they were supposed to be for group shots. He also seemed to be in all the right spots at the right time. After the wedding we sent him a very, very long thank you email praising his performance.

3) AFTER THE WEDDING
Michael told us that the photos would be ready in four weeks. Five weeks later we still hadn’t heard from him. I called and left a message - he emailed back saying he’d been sick, so he was behind in editing. Four weeks later we emailed again. Finally, 81 days after the wedding we saw the pictures.

4) THE PHOTOS.
We received 328 photos: 4x6 prints + original jpegs (4500 x 3000), including the rights to all of them. Some photos were very nice, but only the formals. However, the rest were not what we expected; we had to get rid of 40 because they were outright bad. There were many photos where people were very distorted - and those were not the wide angle lens shots you’d expect: those were shots of us, friends and family, including the ONLY 13-person family shot. Most formals were fine, but while some were sharp, others weren’t. Many shots were very grainy (although there was more than enough light during the event!)

During the ceremony, he stood far away, behind the guests, so the important shots include people’s heads, and of course they were not sharp. There is no good photo of the bride entering the ceremony (although the sun was very bright on that day, so I guess it was a challenge). The reception photos were mostly bad: grainy, not even close to being sharp, many of them distorted (wide angle lens doesn’t work for everything). There are about five photos of our guests most of which are distorted (but we had 90 guests!), the rest are formals, us and family. We have four photos of the cake cutting, which are grainy. However, the grainiest are the photos of our dance - we have nine of them, and their quality is literally abysmal - even for viewing on the monitor, not to mention larger prints! Also, none of the dance photos have our 16-piece big band in the background - instead they feature walls, bright exit signs and very grainy guests - and we are very grainy too of course!

5) CONCLUSION.
The formal photos, the family, the empty hall, the shoes and the bouquet - all those are wonderful, thank you! But the rest range from average to disaster. We had our wedding in beautiful Pipac Centre - and we’ve seen many beautiful wedding photos from that location, sadly those are in a different league.

We didn’t want to write this review - instead we emailed Michael our concerns. A simple apology would’ve sufficed. But there’s been no reply.

...P.S. We are posting the same review to Google to counter Michael's 28(!) "rock star / true genius / talk of the town in Chicago" 5-star reviews. Who writes those reviews?

...Update. We are currently writing reviews for our other vendors, and we are seeing other people's wedding photos. Apparently, our ceremony and reception photos are just bad - there's no other way to put it.