Tl;dr: Great pictures, quick turnaround, provides more than expected.
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First, some background: I'm probably a professional photographer's worst nightmare, being one of those serious amateurs that thinks they know what they are doing. I've been shooting film SLRs since college, got my first digital point and shoot back in 2000, and started using Canon's first digital Rebel 300D back in 2004. I've taken tens of thousands of photos, most of which I think suck, but I get lucky once in a while and take a good picture. I do know what I like when it comes to pictures.
Elisa came recommended by Suzy Q after I had a heart attack upon seeing the latter's $11,000 photography package A. I looked at her portfolio online and liked what I saw - in addition to being well-composed, as you'd expect from a professional photographer, I liked how she used color - the pictures were bright and vivid without being oversaturated and garish.
My fiancée and I met with her over brunch one day to discuss things, and I liked her background and her approach. One of the things i liked about her was that she was good about talking us through the process, for instance letting us know we had to give her a list of groups of people we wanted with us or with each other in group shots. I also liked that she tended not to use B&W because she and I agreed that's often overused to give a fake artsy look to otherwise mediocre pictures. After the brunch my fiancée and I decided we were comfortable with her and did not need to interview any other photographers.
We ended up booking her photobooth package, which she told us came with an assistant for the photobooth. We also had her shoot our brunch for out-of-town guests in lieu of a getting ready shoot.
When the wedding came, everything went well. She brought two assistants instead of just one, so we got more than we were expecting and got pictures with multiple viewpoints.
She delivered our pictures two weeks after the wedding - both online with a SmugMug gallery (with $100 print credit) and by snail mail. We ended up with about 1000 photos, the vast majority of which were very well done, though I did give her some grief over about 30 pictures which annoyed me due to a pet peeve.
She was not 100% perfect - I had asked for her to shoot our ceremony (outdoors at the Umlauf) with automatic exposure bracketing and provide them in RAW form so I could play with some HDR programs, but she said she didn't have enough time and I just got single exposures, albeit in RAW form. It was a five-minute ceremony and that and the post-ceremony shoot were a little rushed due to guests arriving unexpectedly late to the ceremony (actually unexpectedly, as only immediate family were supposed to be at the ceremony, most guests were just invited to the reception). Also she didn't rename the photos, which came from three cameras, so they were arranged in semi-random order, but she'd left the EXIF info in the pictures so it was triivial to rename them using the EXIF creation date so they ended up ordered by time (I used Tempest's Stamp program on Windows because I'm not quite familiar with my iMac yet, but there are apparently free Automator scripts which wil do the same thing if you're using OS X).
All in all though, things went really well and we ended up with a lot of beautiful pictures, so I don't hesitate to recommend her services without reservation. read more