Have you ever sold something to a friend and later wished you hadn’t? Or worse, performed a service for an acquaintance or family member and later regretted it?
Things such as doing the video shoot or taking the photos of a wedding or similar event spring to mind. I’ve done a few of those, and I suspect we all have at some time or another.
I think my very worst case scenario was in the early days of computing as we know it – around 1985 – being asked by the brother of a close friend to write an invoicing and stock system for his wholesale business. In those days, I moonlighted as a software developer using a 4GL database language called filePro 16, and modestly, I could make that package sing and dance I knew it so well.
Anyway, during the course of development – and it wasn’t a difficult task that ordinarily would have taken me a couple of weeks at most – the specifications kept changing and changing and changing, causing a blowout to months and a huge loss of time and therefore a large monetary loss for me.
As fast as I’d have a complete system running, it would require a tweak here, a different look there, a new report required and so on. It just never ended.
The point I am making is to highlight the major error that I made in this particular case; ALWAYS get two things, no matter it be a family member, friend, friend of a friend or someone you have never met before.,
A written and signed off specification and a written and signed contract.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a family portrait shoot, wedding video, live stream of a funeral, shooting a music video of a local band – whatever – cover your back at all times. And if something does come up, stick to your guns and make sure the contract or specification is honoured no matter what, otherwise you risk setting a precedent.
And I cannot stress enough there can be no exceptions to this, because the one you think is going to be OK without, is probably the one that will come back and bite you hard, whether that be monetarily or socially and emotionally.
As an aside, I will never shoot another wedding as long as I live. I found out the hard way that the most important person at a wedding is NOT the bride after all. It’s the bride’s mother.
Thankfully though, I have not had the misfortune an acquaintance had with a large wedding, and that was not having a single shot of the bride’s mother in the entire shoot. This clause WAS in the contract (it was a society wedding) and so at his cost, they had to re-enact the entire ceremony!