Last year I signed up a couple for their wedding that took place a couple months ago. We did an engagement session and I came to realize that the bride was extremely difficult to work with.  After some back-and-forth emails, she agreed to find another photographer and I returned her money.  Happily.

Well, this morning I was looking at a friend’s profile on Facebook and saw that he was friends with her, so I went to her profile to see how her wedding had gone. She had posted her wedding photos taken by her new photographer.

They were horrible.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such bad wedding photography.  Many shots were over/underexposed.  Most were shot with direct flash.  Lots of mis-focused shots.  Posing of the formals was terrible.  It looked like they grabbed someone off the street and handed them a cheap point-and-shoot camera.  Someone who was drunk.

I feel really bad for the bride.  I know the photography was very important to her and she has to be really upset over getting that garbage.

By far, the biggest waste of money I’ve ever spent on advertising has been weddingwire.com. In the last three months, they’ve sent a grand total of eight visitors. Eight! Let’s put that in perspective. During the same time period, I had 1,388 total visitors. 700 came from Google, 111 from Yahoo, I even got 40 from Facebook and that’s free!

So, weddingwire has contributed less than 0.6% of my traffic. If I hadn’t been snookered into a 12 month contract, I’d be long gone.