Authentic Photos and Designs Reviews
Reviews
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![Lauren]()
Lauren Sent on 12/20/2019Very friendly
I absolutely love Christy, I’ve known her for a few years and thought I’d be fun to hire her! She extremely fun and enthusiastic! -
![Amanda]()
Amanda Sent on 09/11/2019August wedding
Christy was absolutely fantastic throughout our entire wedding experience. She was very prompt and professional through every encounter and was extremely easy to get along with. She made my husband and I so comfortable while photographing the engagement session and wedding. The best photographer I could ever have imagined finding!! Thank you so much! -
![Linzi]()
Linzi Sent on 03/31/2019Magical experience!
I reached out to Christy only about three weeks before our holiday weekend wedding. By some miracle, she was available. I could not have asked for a better photographer. Not only did she respond to me immediately, I live in a different state and she was always available by email, text or phone to help me organize the day. In fact, she acted as a pseudo wedding coordinator! She was so fun, energetic, put me at ease and helped us enjoy our day. Her photos were stunning - seriously way better than I could have imagined. Thank you so much Christy - Linzi & Daniel P. -
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![Kyle]()
Kyle Sent on 01/08/2019Fantastic Second Shooter!
Christy was a second shooter at our wedding and was a joy to work with! She was incredibly organized and could have lead the photography team in her own right but was able to take a step back and act as a fantastic second shooter as well. Christy provided coverage for our entire wedding weekend and was able to capture incredible pictures from family portraits to candids of people throughout the night. Christy was excellent and we would recommend her to anyone looking for a wedding or engagement shoot photographer! -
![Emily]()
Emily Sent on 10/10/2018Christy is the best! My husband and I live in Nashville, but we got married near Montgomery, Alabama. She is reasonably priced, down to earth, so much fun, and has a very fast turnaround. All of our friends and family love our photos. We 100% recommend booking Authentic Photos and Designs! -
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![Emma]()
Emma Sent on 09/11/2018Christy recently photographed my wedding in Nashville. From our very first consultation, we knew that she was exactly the right fit. Christy is looking to meet you where you are and to accommodate your needs and tastes in every part of her work. We didn't use a wedding planner, and Christy was invaluable in working with me to put together a timeline of a big chunk of my wedding day. She traveled to meet with me at the church where I was getting married in advance and sat down with me to go through details so we were both feeling solid about things, and was a confidence-booster as much as she was a photographer.
For our wedding day, Christy procured a fantastic second photographer to contribute to the process, Natalyn McCants, as well as apprentice photographer Cora. All three were such a delight to work with, fun and professional at the same time. No one in our families or wedding parties felt rushed or put-upon during our photos, and we all had a really great time. My husband can be somewhat camera shy, bless him, but even he felt relaxed and comfortable.
Christy also made sure to get the shots we wanted and the shots we might have forgotten about. The pictures we received from her were numerous and beautiful, and we'll cherish them forever.
I feel like there is so much more I could say about Christy and the team she put together, but I'll leave it by saying that so many things about weddings can be stressful, and Christy made sure that the photography was something that was not only stress-free, but actively brought us enjoyment and happiness. I would recommend her for any of your photography needs. -
Carrie Sent on 07/10/2018The direction and attention Christy and her husband provided on my wedding day truly enhanced the experience! I felt beautiful and taken care of. Christy is very professional and easy to work with, and I couldn't be happier with my photographs!
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Danielle Sent on 06/11/2018My husband and I love Christy! When we did our engagement shoot she helped us to encourporate our story into the pictures and make it special! She was also a jewel on our wedding day! Very organized and professional, yet laid back and fun!
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Ashlee Sent on 06/04/2018She was a blast and I absolutely loved her being a part of our day! Great photos and seriously fun and professional. She knew what we needed and got it done! Can't wait to get my wedding photos back!
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Ashten Sent on 12/28/2017I absolutely loved my experience with Christy! My husband scheduled her to photograph our proposal and it was so fun! I was totally surprised, and the images were available for us within 24 hours. I love how she features different shoots on her social media sites too! Plus she’s a lot of fun to work with for ANY event.
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Michelle Sent on 10/19/2017Christy was professional and courteous! She had great photo ideas but also was open to our requested shots! Amazing person with an amazing eye for photography! She has a heart for people and a love for photography!
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Tricia Sent on 10/18/2017Christy was phenomenal! Great price and beautiful photos, and she really put our wedding party at ease when taking the photos. Many said that taking photos with Christy was their favorite part of the wedding! :)
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Matt Sent on 06/04/2019
Deeply Disappointed - She made avoidable, critical mistakes that produced very low-quality images
My wife and I are heartbroken over the wedding photos Christy provided us.
If you want an understanding of just how let down we were in a single example, then this captures it: She missed “the kiss”. We have zero photos of our first kiss as a married couple, the one shot you DO NOT miss.
That’s not why I'm writing this review, though - that missed opportunity is just the tip of the iceberg, which I’ll go on to explain later. If you want the details, then skip down to section titled “THE BAD”. If you’re really impatient, just look at the example photos, but I would encourage you to read it all, because I want to fairly represent my interactions with Christy by mentioning the good parts too. Our exchanges were largely positive even though the end product was extremely disappointing.
***THE GOOD***
Before I go on to tell our story I just want to talk about some of the positives of interacting with Christy. If you meet her you’ll know that Christy is super nice. She is upbeat, peppy, encouraging, responsive, and accommodating. Prior to the wedding day, she met with us at the venue since that worked best for us. My wife struggles with some fairly severe health limitations that makes standing for an extended period of time very difficult, so we talked to Christy about factoring this in and she worked with us to find ways to minimize the risk that my wife would not be able to participate in the photos.
When the wedding day came around she showed up at the agreed time ready to shoot. Our reception ran a little long and she actually stayed a little later than originally agreed upon to take our “exit” pictures, so we threw in a touch of extra money as a thank you. I felt she handled herself professionally as she was shooting – not being intrusive, lazing around, or spending too long reviewing photos she just took. Her communication was good, and when I called her to talk to her about the issues you’re about to read about, she didn't get angry or accusatory – she listened, heard me out, a credit to her.
But, in my view, she didn’t do anything to make things right. There's nothing she can do to correct the very, very bad mistakes she made while shooting – the wedding day is gone forever as is the opportunity to get beautiful shots of it. The only way to make things right would be financially via a partial refund, which she declined to give. This negative review is very long, but it is as long as it is in part because I don’t think it’s fair to assert that someone’s work is bad without articulating WHY it is bad.
***THE AGREEMENT***
Our agreement with Christy was a couple hundred dollars less than the ~$1700+ she might normally offer her services for. We negotiated this lower price with the caveat that she would only edit a small number of the photos and leave the rest unedited, sending me the RAW files so I could edit the remainder myself, since I have some experience in that. That price also included a subcontracted videographer who agreed to give us the RAW footage of the ceremony and reception as well a short montage video. We are very happy with his work and this review should in no way reflect negatively on him, but we can’t say the same for the photography side of things.
The agreement was for both of them to shoot for 4 hours at a venue that was largely indoors. Christy expressed that this was different than the venues they normally shot, but agreed to work with us after we articulated what we wanted and expected from the photos. We all agreed on price, we all agreed on the details, we all signed the contract, and she had familiarized herself with the venue, so my expectation at that point was for her to be fully prepared to shoot in that venue.
***THE BAD***
The quality of work we got is objectively inferior to the work she advertises on her portfolio. I’m not saying, “I just don’t like them”. I’m saying they are demonstrably flawed on a technical and compositional level, which I will explain later.
Christy first provided the “edited" shots she had selected. I put that in quotes because my wife and I were surprised; a large number of them didn’t appear to have been edited. They weren’t horrible, but in my view they weren’t wedding-good and weren't as flattering as they could've been. I’m not going to dig in too much here, but in general, the photos had a mix of compositional and technical issues (color temp, exposure, depth of field, focal point, crop, etc.), some of which you’ll see in the included images.
All photographers will have a few issues like these here and there, so you can’t critique any one photo too much – it’s the proportion of photos that had these issues that was concerning, because these were supposed to be the BEST of her work, fully edited, polished and optimized. As we found out later, these WERE the best of the bunch.
At the time, I figured they were just a small subset of the overall shoot, and I knew I could edit the RAW photos myself, so I withheld judgment until I’d seen the rest of them, also waiting to voice anything to Christy.
A while later I received all of the RAW photos and got the chance to review them with my wife. There were 373, and out of that many photos I’d expect about 2/3rds to be throwaways, about 100 okay shots, about 30-50 great shots, and 10-15 “WOW!” shots.
It felt like a funeral. We got sadder and sadder as we went through all of them. The indoor and night photos, which comprise 264 of the shots, were almost universally blurry, some mildly, and some egregiously, and I want to emphasize that they are blurry explicitly because Christy used the wrong settings on her camera, not because it wasn’t possible to get beautiful photos in our venue. This is the most condemning part of my review, because she made a mistake that someone in her first few weeks of photography should learn to avoid: She shot with VERY slow shutter speeds and never caught her mistake across hours of shooting.
Every single one of these 264 shots were shot at 1/80th of a second or slower. The majority were shot at 1/40th of a second or slower which you should only shoot at if your camera is on a tripod shooting a non-moving subject. For you non-photographers out there, that means that ANY movement of the photographer, or ANY movement of the subject in the frame will produce motion blur in the photo, because from a photography standpoint, 1/80th of a second is SLOW. Even with a flash there will be weird after-images haloing the subjects. If someone leans a bit, or blinks, or is walking, or their hair moves, the part that moved will be blurred. As a result, our family photos are blurry, the photos of her dad walking her down the isle are blurry, the reception photos are blurry, even the detail shots of the tables are blurry. Lighting and color issues can usually be fixed. Blur pretty much is what it is – there is no repairing photos like this.
We only got one or two shots of each family photo and very few were sharp. Many of the family shots have someone looking away from the camera or blinking, and in each case we only have one or two photos, so there’s no opportunity to pick “the good one”. I understand that we were working under a time crunch, but when I take photos with large numbers of people in them I always hold my finger down on the shutter so there are 5-10 rapidfire shots to choose from, ensuring everyone’s eyes are open in at least one of the shots. We’re out of luck there.
We went through every photo and out of all of them there are 12 we moderately like, and they still have some technical issues. There is not a single photo that wowed us.
When I told my family about the bad news they began sending me the pictures they’d taken on their cell phones and I’m both relieved that they took them and sad that we like them more than most of the ones Christy took. There is absolutely no excuse for the photos to be as bad as they are with the equipment she was using. She was holding a Ferrari of a camera in her hands – a Canon 6D Mark II. You can take crystal clear, low-noise pictures in very dark settings no flash using that gear. The photos are bad because she didn’t know her gear, and I would be embarrassed and deeply apologetic if I had made such an amateur error and had to give photos like that to a client.
I wish I wasn’t here writing this review, and I really didn’t want to post a review like this, but I’m writing it for two reasons:
1) Because I don’t want anyone to see the portfolio on here and end up with photos like ours. It’s just so sad. I would pay much more if I could go back and hire someone else, but I’m out the full amount. There are so many precious shots we will never have and almost every one of these shots we do have are unframeable.
2) Because Christy did not see any problem with the product she provided us and made no effort to make things right even after I pointed out the many technical problems with the photos. I went to her privately before writing this, because I wanted to give her the opportunity and the time to do whatever checking she needed to do to acknowledge that the product she gave us is flawed. A while after our call she texted saying “I reviewed the photos and stand behind my work”, declining any partial refund. I generally assume people are being honest, so when she expressed that she believes her work here is good, I choose to believe her.
That means she is lacking discernment in what makes a good photo. Any photographer worth their salt will tell you that shooting a wedding handheld at 1/80th of a second or slower is an absolutely unacceptable, amateur mistake. At those speeds even the steadiest hands will have a hard time getting a clear shot of an unmoving subject, let alone living, moving people. Over 70% of our photos were shot like this. When I talked to Christy about this problem she defended her work by talking about the outdoor portraits, but that is less than 30% of our photos and even those are spotty! If you paid for a car and only received four tires, a transmission, and a seat belt, would you want to hear the salesperson trying to tell you how great the tires are?
It’s easy to take decent photos in natural light outdoors. It takes a technician and artist to capture things well indoors, and in mixed-lighting situations. Based on her portfolio I thought Christy had the necessary experience to handle our venue, but she did not.
Other areas of my life have been tumultuous, and I didn’t want to withhold payment because I was too busy to review the photos, so I made the grave error of paying her in full before looking at them.
I asked for $350 back over the phone, which would still net her ~$400 profit depending on how she split things with her subcontractor. I thought that was more than fair and in my view it would be a way of saying “I really messed up and I’m so sorry, but I did give you a fair amount of my time and energy.” We didn’t get a penny back, not even the modest tip we gave her. Frankly, I think $500 back would be most fair and it is what I would want at this point, after the time and emotional energy I’ve had to spend justifying my position in this review. If Christy has a change of heart after reading this and makes things right, I will put an update at the top of this review reflecting that.
Seeing is believing, so I’ve assembled two sets of photos to demonstrate what I’m talking about. The first contains a selection of indoor photos, showing just how bad they are on average. The second shows a handful of the edited photos she provided, and explains why they are not up to the standard one should get in fully-edited wedding photos.
My wife feels strongly about guarding our privacy, so out of respect for her I have censored our faces, but you can still see what I am talking about even with our faces obscured. If Christy references any images of us I ask that she obscure our and our guest’s names and faces in a similar fashion out of respect for our privacy.
We didn’t want to be in a position where we were asking for a partial refund or to have to write a review like this. It feels very wrong to have paid so much and received so little. We just wanted the memories of our family and friends captured well.
All in all we’re just sad. -
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