We chose Gord O'Brien to be our wedding photographer after meeting him and reviewing a bunch of his albums. His albums looked great. The problems started with our engagement photo session. He seemed REALLY slow but we shrugged it off.
It got worse on the day of the wedding. He was constantly walking up and down the aisle during the ceremony, which blocked our guests' views of the altar. He even did that during our vows and first kiss, and managed to only get one shot of our first kiss. (We watched the video of the ceremony later and saw him hustling down the aisle toward the altar right as we were kissing -- he was totally unprepared). After the ceremony, it took him FOREVER to set up shots. He was always fiddling with his camera and lighting, almost like he had never used the stuff before.
At the reception, it seemed like every special moment (first dance, cutting the cake, etc) had to be delayed for a few minutes because we had to wait for the photographer to set up. He even disappeared for awhile during the reception, and we had to track him down to get him to start taking pictures again.
During the 12 hours he was working, he only took about 650 pictures. That may seem like a lot, but it really isn't. Many of the images were just test shots he had taken to test the lighting. (We have a half dozen shots of an empty corner of the reception hall that were obviously just test shots!) Overall, the images were poor and looked nothing like the pictures in the albums we were shown. As an example, we had our picture taken in front of a lake, and the images were so overexposed that the water looked white. There were some good ones, but we were not happy with the overwhelming majority of them. Definitely not worth the money.
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