Crystal Chavez Photography

er for our wedding day. Despite seeming kind and cheery leading up to the day, she and her team were unpleasant to work with day of. Crystal seemed irritated that we were running behind schedule and generally overwhelmed by the chaos of the day. It was communicated to us that the extra photographer that she had with her, as well as the videographer would often be in separate places during get ready time, the reception, etc in order to try to get the best coverage possible. Instead, they all hovered around one another as though they didn’t know how to operate independently. It came across as inexperienced and unprofessional and led to a lack of coverage of several important things throughout the day. Unfortunately, the entire group’s lack of experience also showed up in the low quality of many of the photos. It is clear that she does not understand many of the basic concepts of photo framing, nor does she understand how to make her camera work for her without horrible flash shadows in any lower light setting. Additionally, it took her well past the stated contracted date to get results to us. Two months after our wedding, she was going on maternity leave, and while personal bumps in the road are understandable to a degree, I would have expected a professional to have failsafes in place in order to deliver the contracted services. Because of her failure to plan ahead, we did not receive our photos until several weeks after the latest promised date, which was too late for us to use for our secondary reception. The desire to use the photos and video for that event was very clearly communicated multiple times, including after the wedding. However, the biggest disappointment of all was the videography. I made it extremely clear during both booking and the check in that a full, uninterrupted, video of the ceremony, a recording of our private vows, and recordings of the speeches were what I cared for in the video. Anything else was extra. Instead, what was delivered was poorly edited private vows, a 15 min “overview” video, and chopped up speeches. When confronted about the lack of ceremony video, Crystal swung between claiming this was right and making excuses for why it went wrong. She blamed us running behind for why they couldn’t set up a camera to run the whole time, she claimed it wasn’t in the contract because we weren’t mic’d (the dj had a mic on the officiant, which they were supposed to link up with), she claimed that the extra time she gave us on the “overview” style should make up for it, and on and on. During all communication after the wedding, it was an absolute rollercoaster to communicate with her. She was extremely unprofessional and would oscillate wildly between understanding and venomous. She repeatedly blamed us for the downfalls of the results and it took her until February to finalize the results of the photo and video – she did go back in and add more photos to the gallery and provide more video footage, which still ended with a far cry from what was expected. After the results were as good as they could be, she agreed to provide a refund for the videography, which we received June 1st. I am so disappointed in the way she created such an awful experience around these photos and videos.