Charles Jablow Photography

s completely stressful. We made a good faith effort to resolve the issues presented earlier in a mutually conducive manner but it never worked out. This was our experience: 1) First problem, photographer sends “assistant” to do contract negotiation. She is nice and workable and she did say she will review everything with him, which she did. He then agrees to certain things in the contract and then later says that he never “knew” about these things and that he never agreed to it. We finalized written contract with her and he later conveniently states that he never received it. 2) We were nickeled and dimed to no end, and never got a straight answer, with prices constantly changing on us. Things on the “contract” are constantly changing. For something small like metallic page finish which was written into the contract, we paid the fee upfront and he later said (months later) that it would be an extra surcharge. Apparently it was never verified that his supplier stopped offering this option years ago and that a new vendor would have to be contacted. This was something we really wanted, paid for, and that was never attained in the end. 3) No “photojournalistic style”, intrusive style, lining up everyone during our first dance, group photo was also too small to see everyone. Group shots of small groups before cocktail took so long, taking as long as 10-15 min for one group shot, painfully slow. Our friends and families hadn’t ordered photos from the collages website because so many of them weren’t included in the pics. Our families and friends took great photos that an “expert” photographer could not or did not capture. 4) Pictures that were ours were portrayed as extras, “background” etc. are ours and are not “extras”. A lot of our friends were not included (no group shots of dinner tables so a lot of people got left out). 5) We ended up doing the photographer’s work—picking out photos and dropping photos into folders that were created—isn’t this the photographer’s job? 6) Engagement photo session problems. Understood when dealing with his assistant that the jpgs of the smaller batch would be distributed with the wedding files—they never were. When he did release them, they were extremely tiny useless thumbnails that you couldn’t see anything on. 7) Calling us ½ hour prior to our wedding ceremony about the final payment—who does this? We had repeatedly finalized final payment 2 months prior but he so disorganized that he never took care of it and it became last minute “emergency” that he had take care of. I have to say the engagement session was reasonably well done, but you will get portrait type of shots from someone who trained in the 1970’s, never kept up with new photos techniques and is not able to do anything creative or cutting edge, however. I would like to say that did make an effort to have a photo of our jewelry, clothing as the entrée photo to the album, but these are the only positive things I can say. Very stressful and unique experience. We can however, recommend a great decorator, florist, make-up artist, wedding coordinator and a new photographer.

told him we were looking at his smallest package, and he berated me for not having a big enough budget. Asked me what I was thinking and told me that "all the magazines will tell you photography is not the place to cut back." I told him sorry but that's the budget, you have an option that fits, what's the problem? Not sure why he offers a $1K package if he's just going to make couples feel bad that they're not having a million-dollar wedding (we had a pretty normal-sized wedding, not drastically small or anything). I can't imagine having his pushy and arrogant attitude around me and my family on my wedding day. It's been almost a year and I still get riled up when I think about how he treated me on the phone that day! I would advise against working with someone who can be so unprofessional. Besides all that, I'm positive we ended up with better photos than he would have taken (based on his website's portfolio). No worries, he wasn't interested in our business anyway!

ts he gets. AMAZING PHOTOS and he is WONDERFUL to work with. My husband and I couldn't be more happy with all of our wedding photographs! After your "special day festivities" are finished - you have your memories and your photographs to cherish forever. I highly recommend Charles and his staff - for your wedding, engagement - any special occasion where you want excellent photographs - I can't say enough good things about them!