well, this sad but true tale happened to us. we hired john richmond to handle the photography for our wedding. we met with richmond and he assured us he's a capable photographer having gone to school, yadda-yadda...you get the idea. richmond's a personable guy and we felt good enough, so we hired him to take professional-level photographs of our wedding.

i should have realized something was amiss when in the weeks before the wedding, richmond phoned to ask to be paid in advance for the job (which is not what we agreed to). richmond said he needed the money to do some work on his house. i thought "are you kidding me with this?!" not wanting any ill-will to affect his photographic performance on the big day, we acceded to his request.

fast forward to several weeks after the wedding, richmond sent us the digital proofs...and we were unbelievably disappointed with what we saw. instead of pro-quality images, instead we got CRAP -- a combination of brutally over-exposed and under-exposed images. i got on the phone right away to ask richmond "where are the rest of the proofs? the good ones?" he said that those were them -- the best. i let him know in no uncertain terms that we were "very, very, very disappointed with his work. unbelievably disappointed."

can you imagine the feeling, getting terrible photographs of your wedding, having no chance to go back and fix it?! i'm STILL trying to process all of the bile in my system...

to make it worse, richomond's response was that he could "make some adjustments to the images so they are more in line with what 'we prefer'" -- are you f*cking kidding me with this? these images are total CRAP, it's not about preference! we prefer to have professional photographs -- which is what we were promised! adjustments, HA. that's ludicrous and is hardly what we expected nor paid for. like i said...i'm still trying to process the gallons of bile my body created in response to richmond's incompetence...

no longer having any faith in his photographic ability whatsoever, we were able to secure digital rights to the images so we could hire someone else to fix/recover what we could from these images -- richmond basically got paid for doing a shit job. the images he shot, by the way, were JPEG files -- not RAW. i was aghast when i discovered that! can you imagine...a supposed "professional photographer" shooting wedding photos using JPEGs -- the digital equivalent to polaroid instant-film?!

lest you not believe this story and discount it as the rantings of an angry man...i've included proof of the crap that john richmond created on our wedding night. these images are only resized, there has been NO manipulation of the contents of the image whatsoever. the crap you see is the crap john richmond's photographic incompetence created -- let your own eyes be the judge.