Sooters Photography

Sooters handled the photography for our wedding a few months ago. We put a lot of effort into selecting our photographer, and ultimately went with Sooters after meeting with the owner, John, and reviewing a bunch of his albums. His albums looked great and he was really nice, so we picked Sooters.

The problems started with our engagement photo session. The photographer seemed really slow (John told us he was "meticulous", which I guess was just a code word for being slow), but we shrugged it off because it was a windy day when we did the engagement shots and we figured the wind was slowing him down.

It got worse on the day of the wedding. The photographer showed up to our formal wedding without wearing a jacket. 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 equipment before. He turned what was supposed to be a fun few hours taking pictures around town into a stressful afternoon of standing around waiting for him to get ready and wondering if we were going to make it to all the locations we had planned. We ended up running out of time and we missed two of the five spots.

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 Lake St. Clair, 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.

When we complained about the photographer to the owner of Sooters after returning from the honeymoon, he didn't care at all. He refused to give us any sort of discount, and he wouldn't even let us see the pictures before we made the final payment (probably because he knew the pictures were poor quality and he was afraid we would walk away without making the final payment if we saw how bad they were). He was no longer the nice John we had met before -- he just wanted to get paid and could care less that we had a miserable experience with the photographer.

I should also mention that Sooters put some of our pictures up on their website without asking us first.

We paid for the rights to the photos, so thankfully we don't have to deal with Sooters anymore. We decided to have someone else put our wedding album together.