A wedding photographer allegedly scammed several couples — turning up late on the big day, leaving the job early, and sometimes ignoring them forever.

According to a report by WCNC, several brides in Charlotte, North Caroline have accused local wedding photographer Ali Robbins, who owns Alivia Photography of never delivering the photos of the big day.

Some of the brides have reportedly got the police involved over the incidents.

In one alleged example, WCNC reports that Samantha Lem hired Robbins to shoot her wedding day. Initially, the bride said that everything seemed to be running smoothly with the photographer.

However, on her wedding day, Lem claims that Robbins failed to arrive on time and showed up hours late.

“She showed up to our wedding… she did show up two hours late,” Lem tells the news outlet.

The next day, Robbins showed the couple a “sneak peek” of the beautiful shots that she took at the wedding.

However, after that, Robbins allegedly never spoke to them again and never delivered the images. This is despite the fact that the photographer had already shot the wedding and even showed the couple a preview of the images.

“We could not get hold of her. I tried multiple times,” Lem tells WCNC.

“Our photo gallery was due December 16, and we never received it from her.

“We are also supposed to receive the wedding video from her by February 17.”

Lem says she texted and emailed Robbins. However, she claims that Robbins changed her number multiple times and could not get hold of her.

Finally, Lem’s wedding planner got involved and managed to contact Robbins. However, Lem still did not receive the full photo package from Robbins.

‘Showed Up Late, and Left Early’

According to WCNC, Lem reached out to the police at this point and filed an incident report. Lem also shared her experience with Robbins on social media and discovered that other brides allegedly had similar encounters with the wedding photographer.

WCNC reports that Harley Davis was one of the other brides who hired Robbins to shoot her wedding in 2017. Although Harley eventually received the photos, she says she had other grievances with the wedding photographer.

Similarly, Robbin allegedly showed up to the wedding hours late — and then left the job two hours early at 16:00.

“She did finally show up at the venue at 13:00. when she was supposed to be there at 09:00,” Davies tells the news outlet.

“She left right at about 16:00. She came up and said ‘I have to go.’”

According to the contract Davis signed, if Robbins had to leave, a photographer of the same skill would replace her.

However, Davis claims no photographer replaced her and Robins did not issue a refund. Robbins told her she would gift a lifetime free booking for the mishap.

Eventually, Davis and Robbins reconnected in a parking lot so the bride could get the photos from her.

“She handed me a $50 gift card and said ‘Sorry, but I will not be giving you lifetime free sessions because I’ve heard you’ve been telling everyone what happened,’” Davis explains.

“I don’t like that you’ve been spreading that around.”

WCNC says they attempted to reach out to Robbins multiple times on the phone as well as other social media platforms. However, she did not respond for comment.

Image credits: Feature photo licensed via Depositphotos.

Hamburg, NY– Buffalo Raceway is excited to announce a new track photographer for the 82nd harness racing season, John Emmerling.

Emmerling, a Hamburg native, has been an avid amateur photographer for the past 20 years. He has always enjoyed racing, action, and aviation photography. When the position at Buffalo Raceway opened this past fall, Emmerling jumped at the opportunity to take a more professional approach.

“I’m very excited” John Emmerling explained. “The more I look into the role, the more I realize that this is kind of an exclusive club. There aren’t many horse racing photographers. I’m proud and thrilled to be part of the group.”

While Emmerling may be a new face around the track, he is not a total rookie around horses. His daughter rode horses for years, and he worked at the barn where she rode.

Race photos will be available for order on Emmerling’s business website www.barnstormerimages.com. He can also take orders by email at barnstormerent@gmail.com or phone at 716-415-7716.

by Paige Usiak, for Buffalo Raceway

Apple’s iPhone has one of the strongest performing point-and-shoot cameras around. You don’t have to be a professional photographer to get a great shot from an iPhone, you just have to be able to press the shutter button and most of the hard work will be done for you. 

That’s not to say the native camera app on iPhone offers everything, however. There’s no Magic Editor like Google offers on its Pixel 8 Pro, for example. Don’t worry though: whether you’re looking for extra functionality or you want to make the great pictures you’ve taken even better, these are the best iPhone photography apps out there to download.

Darkroom

There are a number of editing capabilities within iPhone’s native camera app, but Darkroom: Photo & Video Editor takes things to the next level, delivering excellent control over your images and videos. From real-time video playback and 4K video color grading to AI-enhanced depth editing and precise object detection, Darkroom will help transform your images and videos into something rather special.

There’s full resolution editing with more than 650 RAW formats supported, 16-bit color depth available and you can create your own presets too, whilst performing simpler editing tasks like cropping and adjusting background blur. There’s also the ability to batch process a selection of images and an integrated hashtag manager for super easy photo organisation too.

YouCam Perfect: Beauty Cam

If you’re looking for a photo editing app that will do everything from whitening up your gnashers to nipping in your waist in your swimming trunks or bikini shots, YouCam Perfect will have your back. It will make a not-so-great selfie fabulous (even if a little fake), whilst also offering up avatars, filters and frames to add a slice of fun to your images too. 

If slimming down your thighs or smoothing out your wrinkles isn’t for you, there’s also object removal, enabling you to remove a bin or another person from your otherwise Instagram-perfect shot, for example. And if that wasn’t enough, you can add animated effects to your selfies, and remove backgrounds.

Pro Camera 

Some photography apps are for editing, others give you more control at the capturing stage. The Pro Camera app falls into the latter, offering pro-level camera controls such as the ability to adjust shutter speed, ISO, exposure, focus and white balance. It will give you the power to split focus and exposure for the trickier shots, choose between thirds, square and golden ratio for the viewfinder grid and you can capture in uncompressed RAW, JPEG or HEIF formats. 

There are a number of features for filmmakers too, including choosing between several color spaces and shooting in several codecs, along with a waveform monitor and RGB histogram. For those wanting to shoot serious shots with plenty of control, this is the app you’ll want to download

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe’s Lightroom is arguably one of the most famous photo editing apps and for good reason. There are a huge range of features built into it, and it’s catered to multiple levels of ability too, from seasoned professionals to those just wanting to enhance their photos and videos easily. There are AI-powered features from a one-tap Auto option and recommended filter presets, to precise editing through masking.

When you move past the AI features, there are controls for retouching and removing objects, editing hue, saturation, luminance and color grading and adjusting exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, color and curves with precision sliders. In case that wasn’t sufficient though, there’s also a built-in camera delivering full manual controls, as well as RAW capture and you can apply presets in real time.

Snapseed

Snapseed is owned by Google and while it brings a whole host of features for iPhone, there is no Pixel Magic Editor sadly. That said, it offers plenty to make up for that with everything from healing for removing that irritating person that stepped in your shot, to Lens Blur for adding a bokeh effect to images.

As you might expect from a photo editing app, you can adjust exposure and color automatically or manually, as well as crop, enhance details, adjust curves and change the perspective of your images. This app is a photo and video editor only rather than a replacement camera app, but it will offer up tutorial cards with tips and tricks for the app itself, as well as photography in general. You never know, you might learn something.

VSCO

VSCO is both a photo and video editor, as well as a potential replacement for the built-in camera app. It prides itself on being all about creativity, offering a number of free specialised presets for filtered effects, whilst also offering tools like Contrast and Saturation, Grain and Fade for various textures and results, and Crop and Skew for a different perspective.

There’s also the capacity to create video montages, as well as GIFs, while the premium subscription of VSCO introduces access to over 200 presets, along with advanced photo editing tools like HSL and Split Tone. 

TouchRetouch

If you constantly find yourself taking incredible images but there’s a car in the shot, a tree in the wrong place, an extra person you didn’t want or a wire fence in front of an animal, then TouchRetouch is the app you’ll want on your iPhone. Rather than being about adjusting exposure and color levels, TouchRetouch is about making imperfections disappear. 

It can remove a stain from a top, a street sign or person from a background or a mesh from the foreground. If you have a blemish on your face ruining that otherwise perfect selfie, it will have you covered and it can even remove text from Instagram and Snapchat posts. For the times when it goes overboard, there’s a clone tool for manual retouching.

Halide Mark II

Similar to Pro Camera mentioned above, Halide Mark II is a professional camera app for iPhone that is designed to be used in place of the native camera app. It’s designed for when you’re in the mood for capturing more serious photographs rather than a quick picture to send around the family WhatsApp group. 

You can switch between automatic and manual shooting, depending on your mood and how creative you’re feeling, and there’s a huge number of features, including a gesture-based interface and the ability to use it one-handed. Whether you’re after histograms, waveforms or zebra stripes, this app will sort you out and if you have an Apple Watch, there is a companion app for remote shooting too.

Lensa

If the perfect selfie is what you’re after, the Lensa app is one of the best out there. It’s a photo editing app rather than a replacement camera app, but snap that shot, import it into Lensa and you can smooth out your skin, blur the background, highlight your face and get rid of any other imperfections you don’t like.

If you really want to go to town on your poor face, you can get rid of eye bags with a single swipe, emphasize and add contrast to your eyes and thicken your eyebrows. Sounding like a lot of hard work? Don’t worry, there’s an Auto Adjust option to do everything or you. Just remember though, to someone you already look perfect.

This feature is part of iPhone Photography Week 2024. Expect new posts to appear daily, focused on making your photos shot with iPhone better than ever before.

Share your photos with iMore on X (Twitter) using #iMorePhotographyWeek

There are Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s portraits of a village in India’s coastal state of Maharashtra. Over Gill’s black-and-white photographic prints of quiet countryside, tribal artist Vangad has daubed a layer of intricate glyphs.

In one scene, a river’s fish are poisoned by the leakage of toxic waste – invisible to Gill’s camera, but pictured dripping into the water by Vangad. In another, a man walks through a forest glade, gathering herbs for medicine, and is enveloped by the painter in a cosmic web of stars and birds. It suggests an immense world, resonating beyond the confines of rural life.

And it’s Sarkissian who reminds you how fickle a photograph really is. His portraits of emptied rooms, from Lebanon to Brazil, look banal, hardly worth a second look, until you learn their sad secret. These living rooms and hallways, a Hello Kitty blanket and even a messy upright piano, are the places in which a missing person – disappeared in war or because of political dissent – was last seen.

Many people are troubled by how easily images of suffering are reproduced. Whether in a charity advert, or a newspaper, are we not in danger of reducing human pain to undignified spectacle?

Sarkissian’s pictures achieve something remarkable. You cannot gawp at them, or ignore them. He has spoken of using silence “as a tool to bring the viewer closer to the image”. They are haunted, and they still haunt me.

Art is not a competition. But if I had to throw my lot in with any of these, it would be the Austrian provocateur: her barbed assaults on voyeuristic men are spiked with wit.

One time, Export reportedly paraded through a pornographic cinema in crotchless trousers: a proud two fingers up at the male gaze, she thought. Later, she struck a macho pose, spreading her legs insouciantly, while clutching a rifle: in the gallery, she’s glowering for the camera, her hair a mad mess. It’s defiant, and rather crass – and that’s why I love it.

From Friday Feb 23-Jun 2; thephotographersgallery.org.uk

A central Iowa photographer is facing sexual exploitation and child pornography charges.

Information released from the Iowa Southern District U.S. Attorney’s office says 61-year-old Jeffrey Gray of Des Moines is accused of using hidden cameras in changing rooms at his photography business to produce child pornography from approximately 2005 to 2016.

Investigators say they recovered information from a hard drive at his business called Wicked Imagery. They say 15 minor victims have been identified, and they are asking for the public’s assistance in identifying other minors who may’ve been involved.

Any who thinks they have information relevant to the investigation is asked to visit www.fbi.gov/JeffreyGray.WickedImagery or email [email protected].