This is billed as a personalized tour of NYC set at your own pace including many famous landmarks along with an informative tour. The owner of this company, Marc, is a nice man, but I do believe the description of the service on his web site is a bit misleading. Not only was this "tour" not at our pace (it was most definitely at his-I was practically running), it only included three famous locations and at one none of the pictures were usable. They were blurry, dark, and poorly framed.
Although some of the photos taken on this "tour" were some of my favorite of our vacation, they were no better quality than others taken by strangers we handed our camera to on the street. Yes, the photographer had a nicer camera than ours (though not a true professional camera), but many of the photos he took were out of focus, had one of us with our eyes shut, or a weird facial expression- and most of there were not re-shot.
We were moving so fast there was not time enough to even look around. The photographer took no time to get to know our likes and dislikes or interests. He framed his "stock" shots but did not even point out the large "clump" of my hair that was across my forehead until the last few pics of the entire shoot. Many of the photos would have been great if not for that one detail.
As far as a "tour" this was anything but. The photographer spoke incessantly about the subway and how to use it (despite my husband telling him he had lived in the city in the past). He did not let us get a word in edgewise, not even to speak to one another. When we did ask about landmarks other than the most famous, he did not know anything about them. It would have been nice if, instead of telling us how to use the subway, he had provided some history of the places we were seeing. He seemed very much in a hurry to get us to the end of the "tour" at the Brooklyn Bridge because he lives in Brooklyn and it is convenient for him to walk home from there. He did deliver the disc with the photos to our hotel the next day as promised and we were happy to own the photos and have all the rights to them.
Overall, I would call the photographer amateur while, for the price ($250 for 2 hrs), one would expect a professional. Perhaps if the price was lower I would have been more satisfied. It was nice to have someone to take pictures of us together without having to ask a stranger to do it, although we accomplished this quite easily on our own by asking other tourists to take pics of us with our camera. If I had known ahead of time that it would be that easy I would not have booked a photographer. Because of that and the amateur quality of many of the photos, I would not recommend this service.
