Esquivel Studio

Can I give this studio 0 stars???
Do not, and I repeat, do not use this place. The photos were horrible!
I am still so devastated that my wedding (the most important day of my live) photos were so so so bad. It’s embarrassing that I chose this place. What was I thinking? I just don’t want you to make the same mistake.
The lighting, retouching, posing, organization, etc … everything was horrible. I’m so jealous of my friends who have beautiful wedding photos. I did not buy one picture. What a waste. My friends and family look better pictures than these clowns did.
Please, I am begging you. Don’t go with this guy… unless you are into throwing money down the drain and being really upset afterward.

First let’s start at the beginning: I found Esquivel on Craigslist exactly one week before the wedding, so I can’t be too surprised that in the end I’m only giving them a 3 out of 5, and that’s being generous. I probably deserved bad customer service for such a last minute booking. Esquivel appears to be a relatively new business, so perhaps they’re going through some growing pains and that would explain our experience. We booked them out of state from Craigslist when we found them a week before the wedding. They started with a solid 5 stars for being available on such short notice. They were easy to work with over the phone and prompt at responding to our emails and phone calls. We had our contract wrapped up within a day’s notice. We paid $ 1,000 and in exchange we would receive a photographer honoring our timeline to take pictures, from about 2pm at my parent’s house, to the park, the church and then the reception (ending at 1am). One week after the wedding we were to receive two discs of pictures, one disc of touched-​up pictures and one disc of originals.
The day of the wedding Esquivel showed up on time– still a solid 5 out of 5! Once we left my parents’ house and headed to the park, they got lost, and this is where the stars start dropping. Once the wedding was over it was almost impossible to get a hold of Esquivel. According to our contract we were to receive a tracking number one week after the wedding. I let two weeks pass in an effort to be reasonable and not a crazy bridezilla, but soon learned that regardless of emails sent or phone calls made, Esquivel had no customer service skills. Esquivel probably would have had a 4 out of 5 at this point with a simple phone call letting us know that they were behind but that never happened. Once we did get our discs about 2 months later (after they were shipped twice– he said the first discs were lost in the mail) we were disappointed that the pictures he took were nothing extraordinary; in fact my sister’s husband took some better shots with his SLR. The overall photos were very traditional poses (which I organized because he didn’t know how to tell us to pose), and the touched-​up images were just as disappointing, if not more.
We spent so much money on the wedding, and photography is definitely not the area you should try to be frugal with, especially if you want to be happy. With Esquivel, you get what you pay for, so be prepared.