Mediocre photography business ruined by the ego of good-for-nothing husband. Don’t risk the most important day of your life with these people.

I am a YouTuber with 200k+ subscribers and used to cover wedding stills and videos myself 5 years ago. Today, you see so many ads on instagram by wedding studios who send their ‘teams’ of plug and play photographers. You are tricked by showreels of the main founders to pay and you get mediocre work from somebody else. We had spent months planning our dream wedding on a beach in Goa and wanted to have someone authentic and experienced, definitely not a ‘team’ of a studio. We had seen Mansi’s work and liked it. As she was the main photographer, we hired The Grape Studio.

Little did we know that this business is run her egoist good-for-nothing tag along husband who is a master of arm twisting. They will agree to everything you say until you give them the advance and it becomes too late for you to hire someone else. In our case, they flipped from all the agreed terms after taking advance on day one of our wedding. Here is a list of things that happened.

1: They can not be trusted.
On our wedding night, Nisarg threatened us to delete all the footage. That’s right! I had already paid 80% of the agreed amount and I was willing to pay the balance 20% just to get the footage. But logic does not work with an egoist like Nisarg. He enjoyed threatening us. It was written agreement to transfer all the footage to us before leaving the venue and I had also given him a HDD on their arrival. The Grape Studio breached the agreement and did not follow it. They said, ‘footage’ only means ‘photos’ or ‘videos’, you can’t have both. This is wrong at so many levels.

2: Super Duper Late delivery
We had a function at our hometown 5 days after our wedding and the ‘traditional video’ was to be screened there. It was agreed but we could not screen it because they flipped. We have still not received the final video even after 15 months of our wedding. I’ve given up and hence am writing this review.

3: Low artistic calibre
It was our wedding and we were paying them to shoot us. But they were busy making their showreel to fish their future clients. They shot our wedding the way they wanted for their portfolio, not for us. Our requests fell on deaf ears. I’m a cinematographer and I knew exactly what kind of photos I wanted, they did not listen. They did not show the pictures while shooting and left us no scope to improve our pose and posture. Nisarg is really insecure. I remember him stating multiple times ‘hume bhi knowledge hai’ during the wedding while he clearly has no clue. By the way, he is not even a photographer. You can ask him yourself. He just enjoys a free holiday during her wife’s work trips pretending to be a photographer.

4: Poor technical knowledge of camera
We had a beautiful beachside venue but because they did not know how to set exposure, the waves, sea and the sky were blown out in all the videos.
It was a written agreement to shoot at 60fps so that I can use it for my vlog. After taking advance money Nisarg said he will do whatever he likes and shot the entire wedding at 50fps. I really don’t understand this behaviour. Technically both 50fps and 60fps have same data rate and would not have made any difference to them. But they chose to do the opposite of what was agreed just to show us ‘who’s the boss’ at our own wedding. Why?
It is in the written agreement to capture our entire sangeet event including the anchoring part because it had stories from our lives performed by our friends, but Grape Studio did not record it. They did not even have a tripod to record the Sangeet.

5: Poor technical knowledge of mic
They said they will bring a wireless mic system (everyone has it today), but they did not. Instead, they showed us a mic fit on the camera and said ‘it has no wires, so it is wireless’. They think of their clients as fools. I had to give them my mics to record the audio, which they eventually did not use. That’s correct, our wedding video has no interview/video bytes of our parents, grandparents, friends and family members because Mansi and Nisarg do not know how to record audio (and use it in the edit).
The audio of our sangeet was not captured. So in our video, everyone is dancing on random songs that their editor has put on the video. Our welcome speech to our family was not recorded.


6: No privacy
I am a vlogger and we had a written agreement to not share our photos anywhere but they posted them on their instagram anyway. This is before delivering our photos and videos to us. This is before us posting a single photo on our social media. Nisarg kept saying he is an ‘artist’ and this is his ‘art’ and he has all the right to post them wherever he wants. But before taking money from us, he agreed to not posting our pics without our permission. We had a really long fight and reported their instagram from multiple accounts to take our photos down from their insta.

7: Very Bad attitude
They insisted to have a room on the property and we gave them. Their team was staying at another hotel at walking distance. Every night Nisarg would call me multiple times to get them dropped. While the team members understood the unavailability of cabs and were willing to walk. The distance was literally smaller than the resort where we were shooting.

8: The team saved us.
Though we were very unlucky to have Nisarg and Mansi at our wedding, we were blessed with Yash, Kush and Savan who were very polite and helpful. They could see how Nisarg was taking advantage of the situation. They made sure to listen to our requests and worked really hard to compensate for the wrongdoings of Nisarg. They were open to try new things and different angles. They always had a smile on their face, unlike Nisarg.

I have not received what I was promised (forget quality). We are seeking legal advice to deal with them. They probably had the most fun and good looking couple to shoot with a 200k+ subscribers. Instead of collaborating, they decided to arm twist. Do you want to get threats to delete footage on your wedding night?

Don’t risk it. DO NOT HIRE NISARG and MANSI or you’ll be writing a review like this after a year of your wedding.
This is a Grape Studio Ahmedabad Review also known as Mansi Siddhpura Photography Review