Claire August Photography

My experience after my wedding with Claire has been entirely unacceptable. My husband and I were married 7/27/2024 and STILL do not have our photos or any real reason why we are over 2 months past the delivery date. Leading up to the wedding Claire was helpful (if a bit hard to get in touch with at times). The day of the wedding she was wonderful, very helpful and creative when staging photos, just all around a joy. Since then there has been a stark shift. Our initial delivery date came and went with no word and after some prodding she informed us that she was having some health issues and would delivery some photos the next day with the full gallery being available the following week. Those dates came and went with no word and we have had no word since. We have tried contacting her in just about every method available to us with no luck. I would highly caution against hiring Claire as her information link is still open for clients for 2025 last I checked.

Our experience with Claire as our wedding photographer was deeply disappointing. After months of silence, during which she read our Instagram messages but did not respond, we were left with no choice but to threaten legal action just to receive our wedding photos. After sending a formal letter with our intent to sue, Claire finally replied and provided us with a portion of the photos—approximately four months after the wedding. Sadly, many moments we had looked forward to were missing, including decor shots and several specific photos we had requested. In addition, several of the photos we did receive required editing by a friend to correct noticeable issues, such as bouquets facing the wrong way and awkward angles. Writing this review is disheartening, but I would not recommend hiring Claire.

UPDATE: Was 1 star, now is 2. I now have all my photos 5 weeks and 2 days after what the delivery date should have been. Her communication continued to be poor. She again gave a delivery date, missed it, and continued to not communicate. Legal action was threatened multiple times, and it felt like that was the only thing that made headway because after it was mentioned suddenly more pictures would show up in the online album no message or explanation from her. I'm glad I have them and it's over. She did offer a partial refund, but I have yet to see anything from her financially. ORIGINAL: Claire was amazing for our engagement pictures, and we got these great pictures. But post wedding it has been 13 weeks, we haven't gotten sneak peaks. She isn't responding to communication with an ETA for pictures. She has a 10-week delivery time frame and we have surpassed that by 3 weeks. I've reached out via email, text, and Instagram with no response and people who were married 2 months after my husband and I, have posted sneak peaks online showing that she clearly is not prioritizing our wedding that was done earlier. Lastly, we paid for the largest package, and we had her leave 4hrs early because there was no longer anything to take pictures of. She hasn't given us any kind of refund and I've started to consider legal action at this point as the photography was half of our wedding cost.

While the photos we received are beautiful, it is a shame that our experience working with Claire was one of the most disappointing and stressful working relationships we have ever had. We have been trying to communicate with Claire about our September 2023 wedding since January 2024 and as of October 2024, have still not received all of the photos we were promised under contract. In that time I have attempted to communicate with Claire dozens of times and every time have had to send multiple messages, emails, and voicemails to receive a reply. In November 2023, Claire let us know that due to a technical error we would not receive our photos for a couple of weeks, but that we would receive them before the holidays. We reached out after the holiday season in January and were met with silence for multiple weeks. She finally let us know that she had fallen behind and that she needed another week. We heard nothing for a month until reaching out ourselves again. Again, we didn’t receive a reply and reached out multiple times before we were told in February that she just needed a few more days. She ghosted us again and said the same thing in March. At the end of April after repeated attempts to get in touch again we finally received “95%” of our photos and Claire described what we were missing and promised that the final 5% would be coming soon. It is currently October 2024 and we have not heard a word from Claire since receiving our partial gallery after we last attempted to reach out. At this point we have basically had to make peace with the fact that we will probably never receive our missing photos, which is especially disappointing because they include our photos of our dances with my husband’s mom and my brother in honor of my late father. I really enjoyed our first couple of meetings with Claire so we are really disappointed and saddened to say that we would absolutely not recommend working with her for your wedding. She has shown poor communication throughout the entire experience following our wedding and we feel that we were repeatedly deceived by her when it came to the timeline of receiving our photos. We certainly would not trust Claire again to handle the important task of documenting such a special day and hope that she can grow from this experience and learn to communicate better with future clients.