Champaign Studio One Photography

I want to start off by saying I enjoyed working with Bill on the day of the wedding and really liked a number of pictures he gave us. His prices are quite reasonable for the area ($ 1500 fee, all day photographer, DVDs of all pictures). He was very friendly and was patient with all of the antics of the wedding party. The poses he took are very nice and standard; nothing too fancy or unconventional. I wish that there had been a bit more originality in the pictures, but I am satisfied overall.
The reason he only gets an ok review is that he is very hard to get hold of before and after the wedding. It took him almost 3 months to get us the photos and I started calling him after 2 months. There was always some excuse — I don’t remember to respond to emails, my web server is malfunctioning, my DVD burner is down. Once the photos came up on the website, the website proved to be difficult to navigate and very slow to use to scan the pictures. In the end, we got 7 DVDs with almost 4,200 photos of the day. I was a little miffed that my husband and I had to spend about 8 hours going through the photos and trimming it down to a manageable 400 – 500 images. The images also don’t look like Bill did much editing or cleaning up, so I can’t understand why it took so long to get them. It seems to me to be just a giant photodump from the day.
In the end, you get what you pay for. We finally got our nice wedding pictures, but had to work to find them in the massive overload of images and after much nagging.

Bill took the pictures for our wedding and rehearsal dinner in May of this year and I couldn’t have been happier! We met Bill at his home office in Champaign and all of my worries instantly subsided. Bill was professional, friendly, and calmed my nerves about one of the biggest parts of any wedding – the pictures!
Bill agreed (last minute– due to my crazy planning, might I add) to do our rehearsal pictures and wedding pictures. We had a big wedding party, who was a bit wild, and Bill took it all in stride. He moved his lighting around expertly, capturing everyone. He posted a few pictures as a «glimpse» in the days after the wedding and I could not have been happier!!! These pictures were better then I had even imagined… just breathtaking.
Bill truly has a gift, is friendly and professional to work with, and gave me the pictures of my dreams.
I would (and have) HIGHLY recommend Studio One and Bill. Thank you for photos I will treasure forever :)

I hired this studio for my wedding. While I like his work, I did not like working with him at all. He is not very proactive with things, did not give much direction to us as far as best things to wear during engagement pictures, best places/​times of day for pictures, etc. He is extremely difficult to get ahold of, refuses to answer calls or emails for weeks/​months at a time. I got married 6 months ago and still have not heard back from him regarding my album after repeated phone calls and emails. He also put the wrong print into our signature image. The only reason I didn’t give him 1 star is because the pictures themselves did turn out well. I would not recommend.