Eric F Review:
This review is quite overdue; we first worked with IQPhoto over five years ago, and we also have another photo shoot with them scheduled for next week. The length of our relationship with Joseph and IQPhoto is one of the strongest testaments to their quality. They've elevated capturing happiness into an art form in their photography. The hardest part of writing this review is not attaching hundreds of photos, because I have so many favorites with them.
We first contacted IQPhoto for our engagement photos. My wife and I are naturally pretty quiet and reserved, but before we knew it, Joseph had us dancing in front of the Golden Gate bridge and playing hide and seek in the columns around the Legion of Honor (both attached). He would point us to the best place to stand to capture dramatic shots (for example, with the Bay Bridge and an old-fashioned steamboat that happened to be stopped by the pier).
After falling in love with the shots from our engagement shoot, we obviously chose to use IQPhoto for our wedding. They dealt with the very difficult lighting inside of the church, and found little nooks and crannies to take unique photos (for example, from above a spiral staircase). Unobtrusively, they captured key moments, making sure to include almost all of our guests in his photos: during the ceremony, laughs and toasts in the reception, expressions across the board during speeches, and dancing at the end. The attention to detail was amazing -- holding up reflectors to take the outdoors photos at night, or wanting my wife's dress to lay just so (when possible, as they never interrupted a moment, but would direct when we were focused on photos). We got amazing shots inside the church, in several locations around SF, and finally, during the reception at the Asian Art Museum.
Fast-forward a couple years, and we found ourselves expecting our first child. We weren't sure whether to go with IQPhoto again for maternity photos, because they have a very distinctive style. However, we found that their style fits the occasion, because we got gorgeous photos with soft natural light in the Japanese Tea Garden in SF. We also stopped by City Hall, and they really know this place inside out -- dramatic staircases, window sills to sit at, and taking routes to get to the other side of the building, in order to capture our interactions inside of wide angle views of the architecture.
IQPhoto is also amazing with children and family photo shoots. When our son was 1.5 years old, we tromped off to the SF Botanical Gardens. We ended up with photos of him smiling while looking at the camera (maybe only other parents of very small children will appreciate this), candid photos of him laughing while I threw him in the air, and looking with a curious face while his parents hold hands in the background.
As I mentioned in the beginning, we also have another photo shoot scheduled with Joseph and IQPhoto next week. This is also the first photo shoot that we didn't extensively research by scouring Yelp reviews, contacting photographers for price quotes and to talk about style, and comparing portfolios and locations. We did this for our wedding, then researched photographers explicitly known for maternity or family shoots (we even tried another highly rated photographer for an earlier photo shoot with our son). IQPhoto always won out because of our interactions with them, their ability to find creative, unique shots in each location, and also, realistically and simply because of price and the ability to download all the photos from each shoot. In the end, they're amazing at capturing the emotion in key lifetime events in a way that's fun, personable, and artistic.