Wedding Photographer Threatens To Sue Bride For Slander After She Asks Her To ‘Re-Edit’ Her Photos
Is the bride out of line demanding that her wedding photos look how she wants?
Wedding and lifestyle | Shutterstock All creative endeavors are subjective, of course, and that applies to wedding photos just as much as it does to a painting or a sculpture. What a bride and photographer think looks good can differ wildly.
But for one bride on TikTok, the gap between her preferences and her wedding photographer's is so wide that it's turned into an outright battle — including threats of legal action.
The wedding photographer threatened to sue the bride for demanding photo edits.
TikToker Alexandra Jaye Conder was initially thrilled with the photos her wedding photographer took in advance of their ceremony.
She showed a couple in a TikTok about the matter — a shot of her and her now-husband kissing in front of a pastel turquoise ocean, another of them smooching in a Jeep the exact same color as the sea.
But when the photos of the actual wedding came back, the contrast could not have been more stark. "Can someone explain to me what this is?" Conder said indignantly of a photo of her gazing out a window in her wedding dress, which is so sepia-toned the dress looks downright khaki.
The debacle escalated so much that Conder has been dubbed "The Sepia Bride." But the coloring was not her only issue with the photos.
Conder showed other photos where the editing was even more extreme. In one, the makeup along her cheekbones looks like a giant bruise, and the previously sparkling ocean is steel gray and nearly indistinguishable from the overcast sky.
To anyone who's ever lived in wildfire country, you'll recognize the look — it's the exact effect wildfire smoke has, washing everything out in an unavoidable tan haze.
But Conder's unhappiness with the photos went beyond just the sepia. In one photo of her husband Mike and her parents, both the groom's and her dad's eyes are fully closed.
Others were so heavily edited with sepia tone that it changed the colors of backgrounds and Conder's hair and rendered her mom's bright pink dress to a dusty coral. "Why put your edits to change the entire coloring of things," Conder asked. "I don't understand."
When Conder confronted the photographer about the edits, it became so heated the photographer threatened to sue.
Conder called the photographer and explained the issues she had with the photos, and offered to do the editing herself so that they would look the way she wanted for her own personal wedding album only.
"I will sign any contract that you want that states that I won't share these photos," she told the photographer so that her work and artistic vision wouldn't be compromised online.
Screenshots of text messages Conder posted show the lengths she went to in order to be polite and patient with the photographer as she asked for more and more edits. But she says the photographer ended up refusing to work with her any further, telling Conder, "You knew my editing style and everything before you hired me."
Her husband even offered to pay another $1,000 for access to some of the raw photo files, but the photographer countered that it would be an extra $4000 instead. And after Conder continued posting about the debacle online, the photographer threatened to sue for slander.
Opinions online were mixed, with some siding firmly with the bride and others backing the photographer.
Many former brides were on Conder's side. "It’s not fair that they are holding your memories hostage," one wrote. "It may be their art, but that’s YOUR LIFE."
But many photographers were against her, pointing out that supplying brides with raw images is basically never done and often stipulated in photographers' contracts, a point that even Conder conceded.
In the end, some photographers felt there was a moral to the story — do your due diligence about a photographer's aesthetics before booking them.
"Please look at full wedding galleries," one recommended. "Hire a photographer whose style meshes with what you want and you will be so happy!"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.