Griffiths Photography, Bath

You quite often hear of positive reviews of wedding photographers and very few people step forward and talk about their bad experiences. Negative experiences shouldn't be malicious so I will simply try and present the facts and hopefully it may help couples planning their wedding to try and avoid a few pitfalls or issues we came across in selecting a wedding photographer.

We live in South Wales and had our dream wedding all booked up in the city of Bath (where my wife and I had originally met). We hired a really nice venue in Bath. We thought it was best to go for a photographer in Bath due to it being where the wedding was taking place and we set about looking for a local wedding photographer and we made a day trip and managed to see 5 in one day. It was a long day!

Eventually we selected Griffiths Photography (bathweddings.org). We thought he had a good relaxed approach, we liked his modern style of photographing things as they happened and he had some excellent images, plus he wasn't the most expensive. From initial impressions we couldn't speak more highly of him. However. Firstly, we wanted a few posed photographs of the full wedding party and alike, however when he had to organise people he wasn't very effective. We foolishly thought that any photographer should be comfortable in doing this. When eventually he started to try and take control he got a bit abrupt, which crossed over to rude at times, with people and turned the happy and excited atmosphere of having just married into an uneasy silence. Since our experience a few friends have told us that their photographer had been bossy.

Lesson for us: Try and assess if your photographer is a 'people person', I think you can only go on your instinct and by asking lots of questions.

Thankfully, we didn't have too many of these types of shots and people forgot and got on with the day.

Later on he was certainly in his element taking the 'as it happens' photographs. However, it seemed that he had done very little planning as it took ages to choose locations and pose us both. We also seemed to be going from one end of the venue to the other and back again, rather than using one location and then moving onto the next. It felt like a very inefficient way of working. Because of this we felt he must have fact missed loads of great photo opportunities and in our opinion wasted a lot of time. But what's more important is that this resulted in us spending far too much time away from our guests.

Lesson for us: Make sure that your photographer has some form of plan.

Unfortunately it also took double the length of time to get our photographs than originally promised, and although our images are really nice, we had been given the impression that we would have got quite a lot more. For us it seemed like a poor reflection of our day and the length of time we had hired him for. Thankfully the images taken by guests help make up for this.

Lesson for us: Make sure you try and collect all the images taken by everyone during the day. If nothing else it just gives a different perspective.

Lastly, when our album arrived, several of the images were damaged. The album itself was fine, however a number of the images inside were damaged, so the damage must have occurred before it was sent. Anyway, we had the disk of all images and so we could easily replace it. Granted we could have contacted him and he may well have offered to sort it out, but due to our experiences, and the time it had taken to get our images in the first place, we just got on and sorted it ourselves.

Lesson for us: Try and get everything taken on disk. This gives you some form of control.

So overall, we feel disappointed. But unfortunately what can you do? The day has now gone and he can't suddenly produce more images for us! As stated, there were positives about his service but when there is no chance to go back and do something like this, you want to make sure it's done right and I suppose the main point it that if we could do it all again ... we would have looked a little further and asked some more probing questions of our wedding photographer, and certainly tried to have got a recommendation from somewhere.

Lesson for us: I think the other moral for the story is to be clearer about your expectations so there is no doubt what you want and to perhaps withhold part of the payment until you have received everything?

He also had lots of good testimonials on his website which did help sway us to pick him. But nothing on an independent site like this. So if you can't get a recommendation try and find a good review which isn't linked to the the photographer's website.