Sarah Merians Photography & Company

We LOVE our Pictures.
Our engagement photo shoot in grand central station was also great.

Had a great experience with Sarah Merians and her team before and during our wedding. They have a fantastic studio and a wide range of photographers. Ours contact sales associate Jill was very personable and helpful, she guided me through our entire experience. When she left on maternity leave Sarah Merians herself handled my planning and she was awesome too. They have a wide range of photographers from traditional to photo journalistic and everything in between, they do fantastic special effects as well and take care of everything inside their beautiful 5th ave studio. We used videography from them as well but got an un dedited version because it was less expensive, I think it is fantastic and better than an edited version because you get to see everything. Our proofs and video came back to us so quick that we were still on our honeymoon when they were finished! Though they are a little on the expensive side. I recently designed my album and was disappointed in the fact that is cost me so much extra just to have 20 extra images than they include in the album they say is included in the package you buy before the wedding. 50 images is impossible to capture even the bare minimum of what happened at our medium sized wedding. There prices are astronomical and I am disappointed that I can not receive a copy of my photos on a disc until a year after I receive my album. Though I do have physical printed proofs of every picture taken and they came very quickly. The prints are also very pricey I wish some were included considering how much money we already paid them. But I don't want to make this negative, their work is excellent and I am more than pleased with the quality of our photographs and our FABULOUS photographer Tina.

We had an awful experience with a photographer from Sarah Merians. We spent the most on this vendor, knowing how important it would be to have these pictures that would last forever. He did a nice job on the bride/groom pictures, however he failed to capture the event and we have little to no pictures of our guests. He focused in on a few guests and not the important people in our lives. For our reception, we have 10 close up portraits of a girl we had just met that night (guest of a friend) and no pictures of the groom's father or of either parents dancing. My parents have not one picture of their friends/family (3 tables out of our 12). We also have big gaps of time where there were no pictures taken. The photographer was not nice about taking pictures we asked for during the night. I had to drag him over to get the few pictures I now have of my friends and my Mother was only allowed one picture with her parents and he then walked away before she could get a picture with her 85 year old Aunt who had come a long way. The whole thing is just very sad and there is no way to recreate this. The company was also not at all shocked by this, as it seems it must happen to people all the time. I would not recommend anyone take a chance by using this company.

If you want to spend top dollar and get just a few pictures with your husband and none of any of your guests - pick this company. They are unprofessional, disorganized and rude. Our photographer took mostly pictures one would never want to put in an album - no group shots, tons of close ups of the same random people over and over. He was also absent for big gaps in the night. Our parents have no pictures of their freinds and none of them dancing at our wedding. Its not fixable, as you can't rewind the clock, but the company has not even been very accomodating. We also found it intersting that they were not at all shocked by the poor quality work that their photographer produced. It did not seem like a one time issue. I can't speak for Sarah Merian herself, but I wouldn't trust this vendor with such an important day.

for me they were expensive and the photographer didnt care or maybie he didnt like me! i might try again some day becuase it could have been that one guy! i suggest try it and see if you get good or bad results!

We also had a terrible experience with Sarah Merians and ended up successfully suing the company in small claims court. Our wedding was in September 2008.

Below is a summary of some of the problems we encountered.

1. The photographer's assistant didn't bring a camera to the wedding, so we had one photographer instead of the two that were promised.

2. The DVD was delivered late and one copy was defective. When we asked to have it replaced, they delayed for almost two months before telling us that they no longer work with the videographer, couldn't provide another copy and might not even be able to recover the raw footage. Eventually, they recovered the footage but wanted to charge us $600 to convert it to DVD (even though they were supposedly giving it to us to make up for not being able to provide the edited version). We refused and they sent us the footage in its original format (small tapes) which we will now have to convert ourselves.

3. Our actual photographer was nice but her pictures weren't very good. In retrospect, she was disorganized on the day of the wedding and didn't make sure to take a lot of pictures with the key participants (for example, there are only a handful of pictures of me with my father).

4. Our wedding album doesn't look very good. A number of the pictures are pixilated and look like they were printed on a home printer.

5. After the wedding, the company refused to give us the high resolution digital images of our wedding pictures that were included in our contract. We fought with them for months and the employees refused to put us in touch with the owner, Sarah Merians. When we finally spoke to Sarah, she was extremely nasty and made it clear that she only cared about extracting as much money from us as possible. Ultimately, she said that she would only give us the high res images if we paid her an additional $1,500.

Because they had almost lost our video footage, we were worried that if we let any more time pass, we would never see our pictures. So, we paid the money and then sued to get it back.

The reviews on Yelp.com and knot.com describe similar stories.

THANKS!

Jamie Cabrezza was our photographer and she was amazing! the pictures came out beautiful and she did an amazing job!

Wonderful people to work with who listen and know exactly what you want. You also get to choose from a great selection of photographers and videographers based on their work.

We were very satified with the end product but there were a few bumps in the road. Our photographer Jamie was very good. Our video is great too but SM is a bit pricey.

We used Sarah Merians Photography on recommendation from our Event Manager at the New York Botanic Gardens. We were told that they are allowed to photograph in areas of the gardens that others photographers are not allowed because they have a good relationship. As I had been extremely careful in every decision I had made up until that point, I decided to just go with the recommendation and take a break from being overly detailed oriented on this one.
When we went for our consultation, we were told they had a number of photographers that shot in slightly different styles and we could go through their portfolios to pick out the style we liked. I expressed a desire to have a slightly more candid and photo journalistic style and a few portfolios were chosen for us to see. I found a photographer, who's work I liked and we booked him. We would receive 8 hours of shooting and an album including 50 images, as well as a 1 hour engagement photo shoot. Any additional prints or albums would be paid for at extreme expense and we have no rights to the images.
A pre wedding photo shoot was included so that we could meet the photographer and he could get to know us a bit...this went well and we enjoyed the opportunity though we weren't totally thrilled with the results.
The day of the wedding our photographer arrived with his assistant nicely dressed in a tux. However, he never asked where I was interested in shooting and whisked us away without any discussion to start a marathon of shooting. I was a bit stressed so I didn't get the chance to explain I wanted to shoot in front of the waterfall a bit and for there to be more candid or goofy shots, but I figured everything would turn out okay. Our photographer did make some inappropriate comments to one of our bridesmaids which made her quite uncomfortable during the picture taking too.
Still, I eagerly awaited our pictures after the wedding as the entire event had really gone perfectly and I just couldn't wait to relive the memories. When they arrived, I can't express how disappointed I was. The pictures were all extremely stiff looking and the color was awful. They were all sort of orange-yellowish, as though they were taken in the 70s. Our photographer had also failed to capture any of the details that I had worked for hours to create. We had a wish tree created by the florist which was absolutely gorgeous that there wasn't a single picture of and the ring bear's box which I had specially created and lined with moss also not captured. Basically any detail that I spent hours working on was to be forgotten. There were some nice candid black and white shots of people dancing from the reception, but in general I was very disappointed.
When we went to the session to build our album at Sarah Merians, I attempted to express some of the disappoints I had regarding the color and stiffness of the portraiture to the woman who was helping us and she completely invalidated my concerns. Saying the color was fine and that it was our fault that the pictures were stiff looking because we must have just been too nervous. Strangely, family and friends had captured many much more character filled images and with bright colors which looked much better than many of the images we received from our professional photographer.
All together I was quite disappointed with my experience. Yes, I should have been more careful in choosing a photographer and picked someone who was specifically more photo journalistic in style. Still, I think the fact that friends and family captured better shots than our photographer is somewhat inexcusable. We did end up with a lovely album....almost entirely black and white which is unfortunate given how lovely and bright the rose gardens we shot in were....but still lovely. Out of the 1000 or so shots we found 50 great pictures that were bound in a beautiful fashion.