This weekend we had our kids first holy communion and the photographer was booked by one of the parents. Photographs were to be taken inside the church.
When the photographers (husband and wife) showed up they had no flashes on their cameras and I already knew it was going to be a disaster.
I was a professional photographer for a company doing exactly this for a few years just for context!
The husband was in charge of the group/family photos and the wife was taking portraits of the kids. So while one family was getting some another child was getting their portrait, makes sense, saves time.
The husband didn't seem to know what he was doing, I was watching from behind and all his photos were dark, cutting feet off people and hadn't a notion of how to arrange them by height to make the images aesthetically pleasing. When it came to our turn, he literally took two photos of each group and moved on without checking his camera.
The wife took ages with the first girl (there were 5 kids in total) and then moved through the rest quick enough.
At the end she said she thought she missed one child for portraits - again there were only 5! So I asked her to go through her images and I'd see who was missing. She tried telling me she had too many to go through but I insisted she do it anyway. She had taken f@&k all of each child and she had indeed missed one. By this time that child was gone to dinner with her family. The photographs I did see were dark and lifeless just like the husbands group shots.
Then to top it all off she says she's going to send all the photos to the lady that booked her rather than to each of us individually. We don't want our family photographs being sent to anyone but us! She is breaking GDPR by doing this but she obviously doesn't have a clue about that!
The price was €120 per child, cash only. Two weeks turnaround.
How am I going to
a) Make them send the images to the correct families?
b) get my money back when the images come back as poor quality snap shots cos that's all they'll be!