There are three big reasons for my "Stay Away" rating: 1) Time management 2) Lack of willingness to listen and 3) poor direction
1) Paul, I felt, disregarded our timeline for the ...wedding day from the start. I ended up being 30 minutes late for the ceremony (my groom thought I got cold feet!). My pictures did not come in until FOUR months later, and all the while I was seeing other people's projects, like engagement sessions and I think even a senior picture session, being posted to their social media. It has now been SIX months, and have heard zip about our wedding video.
2) I expressed to Paul that family was extremely important to Austin (my husband) and me, and that I wanted really nice family photos, and was willing to take away from our portraits time to make room for family pictures since he and I have such big families. This was one of the only times...probably THE only time that our whole family, on both sides, was going to be together. He shot down the idea of taking away from portraits, telling me that I would regret it later. Now, because of the lateness of the ceremony, we only have one, barely visible picture of the whole family, and absolutely zero pictures of the whole family on separate sides. I don't know why he didn't take my and my husband's desires seriously, it may have been because we were a younger couple, and I let myself get pushed around. Which brings me to my third point...
3) While getting ready, Paul wanted to do a spoken love letter for the video. He told me to just speak from the heart. I told him I couldn't do that and wanted to write something down first so it would be meaningful. He insisted I just speak from the heart until I got so stressed from not being able to think of something I started crying (nerves are already elevated on a wedding day). Also, I can't recall how many times Paul shouted "Just do something!" at Austin and I during our portraits session. It was at least five, and when it wasn't that it was "make out" or "just show me you're in love". I was already WAY stressed at this point, so I couldn't come up with creative or candid poses on my own, and started crying...again...but this time I couldn't stop and had to end the photo session early.
So, overall the experience was really not good and was left with a lot of bad and stressful memories of my wedding day. He did apologize, and let us have more pages in our wedding album...but I just wish I had a time machine.