The last thing that any bride-to-be deserves is to be body-shamed and photoshopped to be skinnier by her wedding photographer when she should be feeling utterly beautiful. Unfortunately, that's what happened to Ohio-based Katie Liepold when she recently booked a wedding package from a local photographer.
Liepold had found Tower Photography on Facebook, and she purchased its $600 wedding package -- which included an engagement shoot by Linda Silvestri.
During the engagement photo shoot in Cleveland Metroparks, everything seemed normal, Liepold told News 5 Cleveland.
"We laughed, we talked, we joked, we shared stories," she continued.
But when she received the photos, she realized that there was something off about them.
She noticed that one photo had a duplicate in which she and her fiancé were photoshopped to be about 30 pounds skinnier — something that was definitely not requested.
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Besides the altered images, she noticed that others were blurry or taken at weird angles.
"That wasn't asked for, and I just felt like that was really hurtful and my pictures weren't good enough to be left alone," Liepold told News 5 Cleveland.
So she contacted Silvestri, who canceled the contract and refunded some of the money but kept the deposit.
A few days later, Liepold found a now-deleted Facebook rant by Silvestri in a local photographers Facebook group that fat-shamed her.
"And people wonder why I have scaled back on my photography business," the post read, according to a screenshot of the post. "Last week, I did an engagement session for a morbidly obese couple."
She continued to call Liepold and her fiancé "picky," and said that their photo shoot had "disaster written all over it."
"It is extremely difficult to get Pinterest worthy lovey dovey pictures when people can't even get their heads together," Silversti wrote, adding that she did indeed give Liepold a digital chin tuck.
"Bad lighting and blurry pictures isn't caused by fat," Liepold told News 5 Cleveland.
Liepold wants other brides to be more careful in choosing the right vendor, and to go based on referrals so that they don't experience what she went through, she tells CafeMom.
She also wants people to know not to take other people's criticisms to heart.
"Don't let anyone make you feel not good enough," she tells CafeMom. "You are your best advocate and you need to stand up for yourself."
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Brides-to-be, and pretty much anyone, should live by Liepold's words.
