Recently I was giving a friend of mine who’s an armature photographer some advice about a friends wedding he’s been asked to shoot. Shooting a friends wedding is a ton of pressure but is an honor. As a professional wedding photographer there is nothing better then being apart of a friend’s special day. The trick is you have to treat your friend exactly as a client because this is your business. From my experience you can’t simply say I’ll take care of you and that be the end. You have to treat a friend like every other client. You have to sign contracts, answer questions and go over everything. In my opinion you need to go over things more so with a friend then anyone else because you don’t want to have any confusion.
I remember the first time I shot a friends wedding. Everything went perfect except after the wedding when I put everything up on a password protected online gallery. Once you logged on to the gallery with your password the site remembered your ip address and there wasn’t any need to log in again, unless you logged out. I released the gallery, called my friend to get her logged in and then went to bed. When I woke up I had 10 missed calls? The voicemails went from “Sara I have some questions about the online gallery” to my friends husband calling, screaming and cussing at me in the middle of the night. They thought the their images were up on the Internet for the world to see. I pulled the gallery and called them immediately. They didn’t understand the concept of the website remembering their password. I was really unset and frustrated at the situation. I had explained to them how the gallery worked, had their best intentions at heart but still ended up being a bad experience.