Somewhere north of a hundred five-star reviews, and the two that aren't are the ones I think about. That's just how it works. You can shoot a decade of weddings, hand back galleries that make people cry, and one star will still sit in your chest like a stone.
Here's the part that really gets me. A review doesn't carry a footnote. Nobody scrolling past sees that one wedding was twenty people in a cellar and another was two hundred in a cathedral. To the algorithm — and to the next couple deciding whether to book me — they weigh exactly the same. One star is one star. The size of the job, the budget, the scope, the context: none of it travels with the rating.
Small jobs, same stakes
Smaller weddings aren't smaller in what they mean to the people standing in them. Twenty people in a cave can hold more weight than two hundred in a ballroom. But expectations don't shrink to match a smaller scope, and somewhere in that gap is usually where a review goes sideways — a misread of what was agreed to, a moment that slipped past me, a day that just didn't go the way anyone pictured. Sometimes it's on me. Sometimes it isn't. Either way it lands as the same row of stars next to everything else.
That's the math that stings: a low-key gig can carry the exact same clout as your biggest, most-produced day. The platform flattens all of it into one number.
What dealing with it actually looks like
Most of what I've learned about handling a bad review is about what not to do.
Don't fire back the day it lands. Nothing good gets typed in the first hour. When I do respond, I keep it short, public, and calm — acknowledge it, take responsibility where it's actually mine, and stop. A defensive, point-by-point rebuttal only makes the next person reading it trust me less, not the reviewer. The instinct to defend yourself is the exact instinct to ignore.
Then I look for the lesson. If there's something real in there — a gap in how I set expectations, a question I should've asked before the day — I take it and I change how I work. If it's just someone who was never going to be happy, I let it go.
The hard part isn't the public reply. It's not letting two reviews quietly rewrite the story I tell myself about ten years of work.
The body of work is the real review
Here's the thing a star rating can't show you: I bring the same thing to twenty people in a cave that I bring to two hundred in a church. Same prep, same backups, same attention, same care. A bad review can flatten all of that into a single number — but the work behind it is the truth.
A couple of bad reviews inside more than a hundred good ones isn't a warning. If anything, it's evidence that I show up the same way every time, and that most of the time, that's exactly what people wanted. Any couple who reads reviews for a living can spot the difference between a pattern and an outlier.
If you're deciding whether to trust me with your day — small, huge, or somewhere in between — look through the work and judge it for yourself.