Friend agreed to shoot our wedding photos for free but 4 months later we still waiting

ChiPhotog6865 · Feb 20, 2015

Ok, so my wife and I are really torn about this and not sure how much more we want to nudge our friend about when we might see some of our wedding photos. Both myself and my friend do not do photography as a business and we are both just pretty much hobby photographers yet she does some pretty good videography.

Four months ago my wife and I had a very small wedding ceremony at a park with about 15 members of our close friends and immediate family and had a very small reception of about 100 people at a local restaurant in their party room. This wedding was not traditional at all in the sense that most traditional weddings go. We were doing this on a huge huge reduced budget, and had actually moved our wedding up an entire year early because my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma last Easter and we wanted him to be able to see us get married as we had no guarantee what next October 2015 would bring in terms of his health. So in the midst of planning a much larger wedding with a bigger budget we had to scrape all those plans at the very last minute in April last year and plan a very short but sweet intimate wedding and small reception on basically no money at all for October 2014.

We cut out the DJ completely and used our Ipad and made a playlist of songs and plugged it into the restaurants sound system. My cousin made a beautiful 3 tiered wedding cake for us and we paid her a little bit for her time and for the supplies. We cut the original wedding photographer and asked our good friend if she could take the pictures for us as she had done a few weddings and video for a few friends of hers and some of her family members before. She knew we didn't have much money at all and she didn't ask us for any but for the few months before the wedding we always paid for her dinners and nights out with us when we went out as we did often go to dinners with her and the movies and other events in town. It was our way of showing our appreciation that she was going to hlep us out. We also gave her a gift card the day of the wedding for $100.

She told us that it would be a while before she got to having the video done and we kept telling her that was perfectly fine and she could take as long as she wanted getting the video together as she had a few others she was working on but that we were just really interested in having the photos first. As an avid photographer needless to say photography is a passion of mine, I'm a very visual person, love photos and naturally after our wedding I was hoping to at least see one or two of them.

We even went as far as letting her know twice already that if she was too busy to work on them that she could just give me the raw photos on a flash drive and I could do the editing on them and have them printed out. We were not looking for anything professional, but just something better than the camera phones the rest of my family had, and of course because it was my wedding I wasn't allowed to even have a camera in my hand

.

We have asked several times and hinted at how are the photos coming and she keeps saying they are coming along fine, and she still has a lot of editing to do, but after 4 months now we have not seen one photo yet.

My wife and I are frustrated because if we would have thought that it would have taken this long to just give us a flash drive of what she had I would have scraped together some money to ask the other photographer to take the photos for us.

I don't know if I'm being unreasonable and asking too much but I have taken photos before several times for people doing fundraisers for veterans things and have photographed just for fun my cousins wedding even though they never asked me, yet everytime I have done a photo shoot free for friends and family I have taken the time to sit down and process the photos and get them to the people within days of the event, even though I never got paid for it, maybe that's just me and I am a very giving person and go out of my way to help out friends when I can.

I told my wife today let's give it another 2 months, at the 6 month mark and see if she has them ready for us. We really like her as a friend and consider her a good friend but we don't want to sound ungrateful by continuously asking what's taking so long, especially when we already told her if she is too busy just give them to us on a flash drive and I would look them over and print out what we like.

Just not sure how to approach the subject again. Am I unusual in that when I do a photo shoot for free for friends or family that I go out of my way to get the photos processed within the next few days, I do it because I enjoy it and I am excited to share what I have done for them by getting it to them as quickly as possible.

runnah · Feb 20, 2015

Sounds to me like she f'ed up some how and is too ashamed to come forward.

No way should editing take 4 months.

ChiPhotog6865 · Feb 20, 2015

runnah said:
Sounds to me like she f'ed up some how and is too ashamed to come forward.

No way should editing take 4 months.

I'm afraid to say I have been thinking the same thing :-( I kept telling my wife, I know all about processing photos, it doesn't take that long, shoot I processed 1,300 photos I took from a trip to Paris in just one week

photoguy99 · Feb 20, 2015

Maybe she's busy and you're near the bottom of the priority list, so no forward progress ever occurs.

Time for a come to jesus talk with her, anyways.

astroNikon · Feb 20, 2015

Sometimes people can get really busy and simply not have the time.
But 4 months is kinda extreme.

Maybe if you tell her that if she (&^ the photos that it's okay.
You want to try and fix them as best you could and if she could give them to you.

Dave442 · Feb 20, 2015

Time to call your friends that took cell phone shots.
Might just ask her, You have our wedding photos or did they get trashed? She might just not want to be the one to come out first and say there is a problem.

Derrel · Feb 20, 2015

I was thinking...maybe she totally botched the job and is dragging her feet because the pics are just super-awful. Still, not even one,single image? I'm wondering if she even had a memory card in her camera...

Overread · Feb 20, 2015

See if your friend is doing the odd wedding here and there chances are it might take them ages to get things done; until you're on a pressured paid and commercial setup its very easy to have lax editing practice because you don't have the pressure to really make a streamlined and efficient workflow.

That said after 4 months I'd have expected to see some pictures too. Honestly I'd say pop round to her house and have a quick visit. You can ask to see shots and at least see what she has got ready. If she puts up 10001 barriers to that its a very good sign that something went wrong. Maybe the card corrupted - maybe she lost it - maybe the harddrive they were saved to died - maybe she has the camera set to take photos without a card and forgot to put one in on the day.

This can all happen (even to pros which is why they have insurance) and in something like this it can be a nightmare to admit to happening to friends.

Heck in my family a friend shot my aunts wedding; he was a pro too and very good with the camera. Shot the whole thing - and the whole time the film inside wasn't wound on right so not a single photo. And this was way back in the film days so no digital point and shoots nor phone cameras (I don't think even those little disposable Kodaks were on the market either). He was greatly devastated that the shots hadn't come out.

Vtec44 · Feb 20, 2015

Yikes! It's unfortunately but I've seen this happened too often and you find out when it's too late.

ChiPhotog6865 · Feb 20, 2015

All good ideas...I'm surely hoping something didn't happen to them and they got screwed up.. we are always apprised of her comings and goings and what she is doing because we are on Facebook together and we do actually hang out with her often so we know that she hasn't been overly busy on the weekends. And with all the bad weather we have been getting many weekends everyone has been holed up inside their homes just chilling because of the snow. I think it makes it harder because we are aware of what she is doing on the weekends because of Facebook and it's not anything that is related to her full time job. She hasn't done any other weddings or any other events and if she did we would know about it.

My wife said that she was going to ask her again and let her know that she was hoping to surprise me for my birthday next month with a few of our wedding photos in a nice frame so could she please see just a few of them and how they are coming out. Maybe that will get the ball rolling and get us to at least have a handful of them.

My step mom took a lot on her cell phone and several other friends did as well, and those only print out to about 4x6 so while we do have several on our Facebook page printing them hasn't really produced anything of framing quality right now except just a small desk size 4x6.

runnah · Feb 20, 2015

I'd be blunt. Straight up ask her if there is a problem. Chances are she feels worse that things went wrong.

And honestly you can't get too mad at her if there is an issue as she did do you a favor. It still sucks either way but that is the reality of the situation.

sm4him · Feb 20, 2015

ChiPhotog6865 said:
My wife said that she was going to ask her again and let her know that she was hoping to surprise me for my birthday next month with a few of our wedding photos in a nice frame so could she please see just a few of them and how they are coming out. Maybe that will get the ball rolling and get us to at least have a handful of them.

^This is what I was going to suggest. Ask her if she could provide you with "just a few" of the shots she's already processed. Since she has already stated that they are coming along fine, she really isn't going to have much of an "out" for that request. Either she has some done, as she has at least heavily suggested...or she's got to explain WHY she still doesn't have even one single photo processed for you.

ChiPhotog6865 · Feb 20, 2015

sm4him said:
ChiPhotog6865 said:

My wife said that she was going to ask her again and let her know that she was hoping to surprise me for my birthday next month with a few of our wedding photos in a nice frame so could she please see just a few of them and how they are coming out. Maybe that will get the ball rolling and get us to at least have a handful of them.

Click to expand...

^This is what I was going to suggest. Ask her if she could provide you with "just a few" of the shots she's already processed. Since she has already stated that they are coming along fine, she really isn't going to have much of an "out" for that request. Either she has some done, as she has at least heavily suggested...or she's got to explain WHY she still doesn't have even one single photo processed for you.

Yep, correct, so we will see what she says to her on that. and runnah, yes, if she did mess them up, well that is what happens sometimes, I think she knows us well enough that we are not going to hate her or stop talking to her, or stop being her friend, she is a dear friend of ours and we are not like that at all, but if she did mess them up or something just didn't come out I would definitely like to try to salvage some of them. I just was trying to not keep bugging her but now that it's reached the 4 months mark I'm starting to get antsy, yet I'm a true Pisces and don't like conflict so I don't want to have her getting angry at us either since we keep asking and she wasn't getting paid like a professional to do it.

ronlane · Feb 20, 2015

ChiPhotog6865 said:
Yep, correct, so we will see what she says to her on that. and runnah, yes, if she did mess them up, well that is what happens sometimes, I think she knows us well enough that we are not going to hate her or stop talking to her, or stop being her friend, she is a dear friend of ours and we are not like that at all, but if she did mess them up or something just didn't come out I would definitely like to try to salvage some of them. I just was trying to not keep bugging her but now that it's reached the 4 months mark I'm starting to get antsy, yet I'm a true Pisces and don't like conflict so I don't want to have her getting angry at us either since we keep asking and she wasn't getting paid like a professional to do it.

I think this is something that you should tell your friend so there is NO "think" to it.

I'm interested in hearing the outcome to this one.

Designer · Feb 20, 2015

Just tell her you're coming over right now to get the photos and/or the electronic files. Then hang up, get in the car, and go there. Take whatever she's got, thank her, and leave.