The good:
Holly is excellent on the day of wedding. She is calm, cheery, creative, directive, and an excellent communicator. One thing that I appreciated hearing from her is that anytime I needed a break, I could let her know. That gave me a lot of ease and I felt comfortable telling her when I needed a break or when things were too much. She's very intuitive in that way. She let the bridal party take breaks and she checked in with me when needed about what was next. She worked well with other vendors.
Her close up photography is outstanding with details...ties, jewelry, vows, you name it. Outstanding and incredible.
Overall, communication was decent leading up to the wedding. She reliably responded to emails within 24 hrs business day which I appreciated because many of my vendors weren't that way.
The not so good: Holly uses a clunky program to communicate via email with her clients. Even though she reliably responded within 24 hours, searching our emails with her and viewing things like our invoice and our contract was a pain. You have to create usernames and passwords, and reading previous emails with her were a mess to search and read. Her program isn't user/client friendly. I am totally 100% for businesses to document things in writing so I get why she uses the program, but it's just a poor program.
The best case in point about this is that the program automatically generated an email to my fiance and I about a due final payment to be paid online. At first we thought this was helpful so we faithfully paid the remaining balance online. But then we got a panicked email from Holly saying our contract says we needed to pay cash or check and that there are huge service fees for paying credit card. It ended up being a huge pain for both us and Holly to figure out...we were irritated (as was she!) About the fact that we were asked to pay online by credit card. When I pay...I don't generally look back at the contract and read the fine print about whether to pay cash or check...not when I'm juggling multiple vendors and multiple contracts and payment due dates. The contract in it of itself is not easily accessible without having to dig In a myriad of emails to find the login for the website and then actually login.
Finally, Holly's pricing covers up to 8 hours of photography. At the end of the day I kind of wish I went with a photographer that covered whole day photography instead. We had to pay an extra hefty sum to get Holly to stay and take pictures of our reception and our sparkler exit. The reception pictures we had to pay extra for were golden and so treasured because there were things that went on during our reception that we didn't even know but she captured wonderfully. The sparkler photos were kind of a disappointment and didn't look great (people were too spaced out, the framing of the photos were poor). The extra money we had to pay for Holly to stay a couple extra hours were worth it mostly for the dancing photos and group photos she took, but definitely not the sparkler photos...which kind of made me wonder if it would have been better for us to pay for a photographer that included whole day services.
Overall we do recommend Holly as she is a great day of photographer. There are a couple things we wished were different but nothing absolutely groundbreaking. We received our photos about 1-2 months after our date and there were about 1,000 photos! Some of them were duds as expected but some will end up on the wall! read more