My wife and I were married 5 years ago. We were pleased with the event, overall, but there’s been a lingering problem: our photographer disappeared without giving us many photographs.
We got to look through the proof book, and order a bunch of photographs. We paid her up front (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). Then we didn’t hear from her for a while. When we finally tracked her down, she’d moved to Montana (from Seattle) for health reasons, and promised just to send us all of the negatives, etc. The return address was a PO Box.
She mailed us some of the color photos we’d ordered. In a regular cardboard priority mail envelope. Which took in some sand, and scratched the photos.
After that, nothing. We couldn’t find a phone number, address, or a record of her business license in Montana. She stopped renting that PO Box and didn’t respond to the last thing we mailed her.
This was all a few years ago, of course, but it still nags at me. My wife is really disappointed about the pictures, as am I. We’ve considered paying one of those Internet record-tracing sites, or even hiring a private investigator to track her down…but it’s hard to know if that would work.
Advice? Is a PI the right way to go, or should we go with paid-for search, or what? Although we’ve considered legal action, I’d really just be happy if we could get the damn negatives out of her. Even just all the photos we ordered would be a start.
I’d say a PI is the way to go, since they have the tracking experience. If anyone could trace her, it would be a PI.
OTOH it’s going to cost a great deal of money. Have you thought about taking the scratched photos to a specialist, get them repaired, and have negatives made?
This might be a “d’oh, of course I have” sort of suggestion, and if so I apologise, but have you googled and otherwise searched for her on the net? Have you tried “wedding photography” in the Montana yellow pages? If she is still working as a photographer, she has to advertise. Oh, and you might wanna send everything registered mail when you find her so you know she got it even if she doesn’t reply.
That’s a possibility. Sadly, these represent about a third of the photos we’re owed. But something would be better than nothing, so that’s probably worth investigating.
Yes. She had a web page for a while, but it’s gone now. (Although I just checked archive.org – thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can still see where she was.) Sadly, there was no address included on her page. There was a phone number, and I remember trying it without success. Maybe there was no answer, or maybe it was busy – honestly, I don’t remember. Didn’t work as a method of contact, though.
I’ve done qwestdex, which doesn’t show anything, but I haven’t tried a physical phone book. That’s probably a good idea.
We were using registered mail when we found her the first time. Last thing we tried sending to the PO Box came back returned without a forwarding address.
Here’s a general question: how much would it cost to have a PI do something like this? A ballpark figure is fine, because I really have no clue.