Leonslens: Good photos, but will disappear once you've paid him!

<p>My wife and I hired Leon Oosthuizen (http://www.leonslens.com/about) as the photographer for our wedding. Although he was more expensive than average, his pictures seemed to be very good. <br />We met him and he seemed nice. We both liked him, and there were no initial signs of any slippery dishonesty. That only appeared AFTER he'd got our money. </p> <p>Our wedding was on 29 October 2016. So it's now been almost 5 months since our wedding, and for the life of us, we cannot get our wedding photos out of him. He doesn't respond to emails or text messages, and doesn't answer the phone or return calls. <br />Eventually we discovered that the only way to get any sort of response is to threaten him. We have succeeded in getting some basic low-res photos in black & white (!?) but not even formatted as per the contract. We paid him for high-res, formatted, (COLOUR!) pictures and a printed album. We have the contract here, but needless to say, he's not delivering. <br />In terms of applying pressure, most recently, we got a response to our email when we told him we would contact our lawyer. Heart-felt promises followed in the email reply, and then silence. Again, the date he had promised us he would get them to us passed, and (again) he has gone silent. <br />We've saved all correspondence (which we're happy to share), and we are now going to send him a lawyers letter but the entire episode has added a bit of a cloud over our wedding. We regret hiring him, in spite of his obvious s**** at photography, and we would advise other soon-to-be-weds not to hire him. It is simply not worth the effort to deal with the ongoing broken commitents. </p> <p>Rather get an honest, reliable photographer, who will give you the service as per the contract, and will not slip away as soon as he's got your money. </p>