When we first met Sarah, she was wonderful – on time, very responsive, friendly, and professional. Much like other reviews I have read, she allowed us to create a custom package so that we could get all the things we wanted and nothing we didn’t. The next month we had an engagement session with her that went great, and got our pictures back within a reasonable time frame and they looked amazing. Two months before the wedding (November), I had a bridal shoot with Sarah. The shoot itself was wonderful and I was excited to see the finished product.
Unfortunately, after this point Sarah’s responsiveness and timeliness declined severely.
Despite a number of phone calls and emails to her, and promises from her that the CD was in the mail, I did not get the bridal portraits back in time to do anything with them for the wedding; so while the pictures were beautiful, this was a pretty big disappointment.
On the wedding day (January 2010) Sarah was great – she arrived early, was very friendly and professional and went out of her way to make sure we got all the shots we wanted. After the wedding, receiving the pictures and our books was another story altogether. When we initially met with Sarah we were told it would be about a month before we could expect to have the CD with our pictures and about 4-5 months for the books (ours and 2 parent books). This was definitely not the case though.
We received half our pictures about 3 months after the wedding and were told that the rest were on her assistant’s computer, which was broken. It was not until July of 2010 that we finally had all of our wedding pictures on the CDs. During this time we had moved about 5 hours away for work, and because her email was down for a good portion of spring 2010 she never responded to any of my requests to finish our pictures/books before we moved. In August 2010 my husband and I made a trip back to Raleigh just to sit with Sarah and go over pictures and layout for our wedding books. We had found out she was pregnant and due December 2010, and so we wanted to get things taken care of before she had the baby. When we left, we were promised we would have the proofs of the books in a week and once we approved the design they would be sent to the company that makes them immediately. Weeks went by and we still had nothing.
Finally in November after trading numerous phone calls and emails regarding the books, my husband and I wrote a long letter to Sarah explaining our frustrations and disappointments, and that we needed this to be finished or else we were going to take further action. Sarah called me the very next day apologizing profusely and promising that things would be taken care of right away. Not long after, the proofs were sent to us, we approved them, and they were sent to the company for production. We received our book right after Christmas, but there were no parent books. When I called Sarah to ask what happened to them, it was obvious they had just not been ordered. Finally, at the very end of January 2011 (13 months after the wedding), we got the parent books in the mail. Sarah did give two 16x20-matted prints for free of our wedding for our trouble, but even those took five weeks (four more than promised) and many phone calls to receive.
While many of the pictures Sarah took were wonderful, others were just average; and none of the pictures were worth the frustration of dealing with the process and lack of professionalism. If I could do it all over again, I would have definitely picked another wedding photographer.
