ClikWeddings
02-10-2010, 10:10 AM
It seemed like the perfect solution. Claire, my best friend from art school and a talented photojournalist, had offered to shoot my wedding as a gift. I loved her work and trusted her to be respectful and unobtrusive at the ceremony. She knew me as well as anybody, and I felt she could capture the event better than any stranger I could hire. She seemed like a perfect fit. And of course, it would be free.
Unfortunately, it ended up costing more than I could have ever imagined. The ceremony was not without difficulty; a last minute rainstorm drove us into a less than desirable pavilion, but Claire seemed to take the change of venue in stride. After the ceremony, she took charge, set up all the groups and worked the reception. I didn’t give it a second thought during the day, only congratulating myself for having such a confident professional as a friend. When things started to wind down, she handed me all the memory cards with the images, wished me and my bride a happy marriage, and said goodnight. The next morning she was on a plane back to the west coast.
And that’s when the trouble started. I found it much more difficult than I expected to edit someone else’s work. There were hundreds of images, and each one had to be checked for focus and composition, each one required adjustment for exposure and color. It was a monumental task. To make matters worse, as I started to look closer at the work, there were some serious problems. Important images were either out of focus or blurred. My friends and family, who Claire knew from the past, were all well documented. My wife’s family- not so much. The ceremony itself was a complete disaster- the change in location had created a genuinely challenging lighting situation, and Claire had failed to compensate. As a professional photographer myself, I found it very difficult to look at the images, and as a result, the editing process stretched on and on. Eventually, I had to face my new wife and tell her that my friend had let us down, and that if we were going to have an album, we needed to start calling the guests to see what pictures they might have.
It was not a conversation that I enjoyed.
But the worst was yet to come. Claire started emailing, asking how we liked the pictures. What could I say? I just couldn’t bear to tell her the truth- that it was an unmitigated disaster and hardly anything she shot was usable. So I stalled. I told her I had been too busy to do the editing, hadn’t really had a chance to go through it all. I was damning with faint praise, but I couldn’t tell her how I really felt. At the same time, my wife was pushing to get something together, so I started contacting people to ask for whatever pictures they might have. Naturally, Claire eventually heard from mutual friends what was really going on. Five years have gone by, and our friendship has not been the same since.
Wedding photography presents unique challenges and opportunities. In hindsight, I understand now that Claire’s personal style as a journalist didn’t translate well to the work I wanted done. She probably underestimated how difficult it would be to shoot a wedding. I should have insisted that she be a guest and enjoy the day with everybody else. In the long run, it would have cost me much less.
Unfortunately, it ended up costing more than I could have ever imagined. The ceremony was not without difficulty; a last minute rainstorm drove us into a less than desirable pavilion, but Claire seemed to take the change of venue in stride. After the ceremony, she took charge, set up all the groups and worked the reception. I didn’t give it a second thought during the day, only congratulating myself for having such a confident professional as a friend. When things started to wind down, she handed me all the memory cards with the images, wished me and my bride a happy marriage, and said goodnight. The next morning she was on a plane back to the west coast.
And that’s when the trouble started. I found it much more difficult than I expected to edit someone else’s work. There were hundreds of images, and each one had to be checked for focus and composition, each one required adjustment for exposure and color. It was a monumental task. To make matters worse, as I started to look closer at the work, there were some serious problems. Important images were either out of focus or blurred. My friends and family, who Claire knew from the past, were all well documented. My wife’s family- not so much. The ceremony itself was a complete disaster- the change in location had created a genuinely challenging lighting situation, and Claire had failed to compensate. As a professional photographer myself, I found it very difficult to look at the images, and as a result, the editing process stretched on and on. Eventually, I had to face my new wife and tell her that my friend had let us down, and that if we were going to have an album, we needed to start calling the guests to see what pictures they might have.
It was not a conversation that I enjoyed.
But the worst was yet to come. Claire started emailing, asking how we liked the pictures. What could I say? I just couldn’t bear to tell her the truth- that it was an unmitigated disaster and hardly anything she shot was usable. So I stalled. I told her I had been too busy to do the editing, hadn’t really had a chance to go through it all. I was damning with faint praise, but I couldn’t tell her how I really felt. At the same time, my wife was pushing to get something together, so I started contacting people to ask for whatever pictures they might have. Naturally, Claire eventually heard from mutual friends what was really going on. Five years have gone by, and our friendship has not been the same since.
Wedding photography presents unique challenges and opportunities. In hindsight, I understand now that Claire’s personal style as a journalist didn’t translate well to the work I wanted done. She probably underestimated how difficult it would be to shoot a wedding. I should have insisted that she be a guest and enjoy the day with everybody else. In the long run, it would have cost me much less.