⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sue said herself that she's good at taking the photos, and not so good at everything else. This turned out to be more true than I could have imagined. She is a great photogr...apher, but a terrible business woman—she tried to add an excessive extra fee two weeks before the wedding and ruined the video of my first dance.
The photos Sue got of my wedding are beautiful, and she adapted well when all of my plans got changed because of the pouring rain. She still was willing to get outside photos at the top of Mt. Greylock, and did a great job finding good spots for fall colors.
HOWEVER, two weeks before the wedding, she tried to charge me an extra travel fee of $150 *AN HOUR,* even though she'd previously said she doesn't charge fees. She had the time, date, and location as well as a warning that traffic might be extremely bad on the day of, all over a year in advance. Some kind of travel fee is okay, but not $150 an hour, two weeks before the wedding, with nothing in the contract or on her website about it, and with her freely admitting that if there wasn't traffic, she would sit in Bascom Lodge and work on the photos from other weddings while charging me $150/hr. If that’s how she does things, that’s fine, but I needed to know over a year ago, so I could've hired someone else. I was furious and anxious, but I didn’t feel that I could say no, because she could decide to just not show up, and then I'd have no photographer at all. Because of the rain, our plans changed, and she didn't end up charging us a travel fee, but she did cause excessive stress and made me distrust her.
Then, I told her both in advance and at the wedding that my husband and I had been taking dance classes and rehearsing our choreographed first dance for over a year. I told her that it was very important to me that we get a good, clear video of the dance. I introduced her to the friend who would be videoing it, and told Sue that my friend would be standing in this exact corner the whole time. Sue had a full range of motion to move around us to the right of my friend, and because my friend was in a corner, there was absolutely no reason Sue would ever need to get around her, because there was a wall immediately to my friend’s left. And yet, Sue found it necessary to run in front of my friend multiple times, including at the moment of the lift my husband and I had worked so hard on. I would 100% trade the photos she got of the first dance for a clean video, but there’s really no reason I couldn’t have both—except Sue ruined it. She created over 20 hours of video editing for me, trying to salvage the video my friend got and piece it together with clips others got, from all sorts of bad angles.
She also ran in front of the video when we were reading the vows we wrote ourselves, so to go along with the beautiful audio of my husband’s vows, I have a video of her ass (often literally just her ass). That I’m less upset about, because the ceremony was imperfect and a little wonky anyways, and because I was less adamant about wanting a clear video. But we performed the dance perfectly, and she ruined it. I cried for over two hours when I saw the footage, because this was so important to me and she didn’t care enough to remember. So, she got some great photos, but she really did not seem very professional to me, especially since she has so many glowing reviews. I can’t say that I would ever recommend her or hire her again.