Working with Photographers

This subject is dear and near to me because it is happening to me. I was married 10 and half months ago and I still don't have a wedding album. Things I wish I had considered asking the photographer before we chose them.

Do you know photoshop?
Do you work on your photos ie. cropping, color correction etc.?
If so can I see see some of this sophisticated work?

Now granted I worked with someone that I knew and we went through other wedding albums she had done. After the wedding she gave me some proofs and they were phenomenal. She did a fantastic job. My mother worked with her to pick out pictures she wanted for her book and the book that my husband and I would have.

The photographer jumped right into this project without being capable of providing the photos in their highest quality. We received a real basic leather bound book that was fantastic but then you open it up and look at the photos. Some were blurry some where off color for example my dress was a latte/really light brown color and in the pictures it look silver. Also, she stretched some of the photos and shrunken some photos so the people in the picture had really long faces or really small round faces. Not too big of a deal there were about 5 out of the bunch lets fix them. Now for the second book again a gorgeous book but it was a composite of photos a background and then two or three laid over the background. This book was a disaster of 72 dpi photos that were pixelated, color corrected horribly and stretched.

This book had to be done all over. After having looked at it I had to step in and get it done correctly. So I asked her for the composites and thought I can just redo the photos and plug them in. Not the case she hadn't saved the files in a layers format so they all had to be redone. This is where I start getting a bit annoyed. There are about 50 pages and probably 150 photos in this book and they all needed to be re-cropted, resized, color corrected, tattoos removed, and some people removed. I had a few disk she had given me as I had asked for all the photos that she had taken at the wedding to be put on the disks. Well, she had given me ones she had already messed with not the originals. So I called and told her which ones I needed and had her upload them to my website. She was rather half assed about this. Then she was going to be leaving the country for sometime. I asked if she could grab every single photo and send them to me. Her husband send it several days after she left and when I got the disks I received 4 disk all of the same photos and not including all the photos in the book.

It is now 4 weeks later and I am almost done with the album layout but I still don't have all the photos to work with. I wrote an email and asked if she go the the book that she has and send me all the photos that she sees in this book. Sure no problem she will overnight the disks to me in the next day or two. Guess what another week has gone by and still she has not sent these off.

So I am venting here on this blog and realizing the mistakes I have made in the process of hiring a photographer.

A. If you are photographer don't chew off more than you can handle.
B. Try things on your own instead with a client and their money.
C. Take a few photoshop classes or find someone to do the photo changes for you.
D. Save all original photo's in a file and save any changes in a new file.
E. Always save a layered version of a photoshop file.
F. Take responsibility when you have screwed up-admit your mistakes
G. An most importantly follow through with your client because this was probably the most frustrating part of this whole ordeal.

If anyone has any other suggestions to add to this experience it is greatly appreciated. I just don't want anyone else to go through something like this.