George Street Photo and Video Impressive website, HORRIBLE product and service Schiller Park Illinois

We were married on August 9, 2014 and chose George Street after a lot of research. The sales associate and website were impressive, but the final product and customer service was extremely disappointing. The entire operation turned out to be little more than a flashy web site and a great marketing team. Our initial call/email was in December 2014 after receiving our photographs/video. For the past year, we have been re-living this nightmare and still have not heard back from the last email we recently sent in July 2015. We are now a week away from our 1-year annivesary, and this issue has not been resolved.

To sum up the issues noted with the photography: (1) missing shots - we only have one picture of one table of guests at the reception.  I assumed it was standard protocol to get a picture of each table of guests so we remember who was there.  Perhaps we should have asked for this explicitly, but it doesn’t appear it would have mattered.  We also had an entire courtyard area and alcove area where the bar was.  These areas were crowded all night, but seemed to disappear in the photographs once the reception started; (2) processing – it doesn’t appear that any photographs were processed at all.  There are no touch-ups, no special effects, I’m not even sure if any were cropped.  A select few were converted to black and white, and that was the extent of it.  A huge selling point of the company was that the photos were processed by professionals to give them the look of the photos shown on the web site and in the presentation.  The raw photos we uploaded to Facebook look better than the photos on the web site, because Facebook at least automatically brightens them; (3): Photo album – Based on the presentation and web site we really expected to be amazed when we first looked at our album online.  Instead, our immediate reaction was, “I could have made this in ten minutes on Snapfish.”  Again, no photos were touched up in any way, other than a couple black and whites.  We certainly expected more from a company who specializes in photography.  It was also a painful process to change photos around from the first draft. Finally, the album has a random picture of us on the FRONT COVER which was NEVER discussed with us

To sum up the issues noted w/the videography: (1) quality (overall quality is awful.  It honestly looks like it was shot on an 80’s camcorder.  Even the title screen is fuzzy.  I understand picture quality is not going to be the greatest in poor lighting like in a reception hall, but even in the well-lit church it is extremely grainy.  I don’t know if this is a result of the recording equipment or conversion in production, but it is far from acceptable. (2) Personal microphone – husband was mic’d during the entire ceremony, and the videographer did a sound check and said everything was working properly.  Neither me, nor my husband can be heard at all during the ceremony; (3) Cocktail hour – There is a 15-second clip of video from our cocktail hour.  We had live music played by our friends in a beautiful courtyard on an 80 degree sunny August day, where all our guests were gathered and enjoying themselves. Only 8-seconds were of the musicians playing outside.

We paid $4000 for the photo & video package and feel like we've truly been ripped off. There is no way to "re-do" our wedding day, but we would like a refund from George Street and our raw video footage (which they want to charge us more to obtain) to take elsewhere.