Note: Photographers’ Friday is a weekly blog series directed toward professional photographers, and in some instances, serious amateur photographers. All Photographers’ Friday blog posts will assume that readers have a basic working knowledge of digital SLR cameras, but if you’re left with questions or don’t understand any of the information, don’t hesitate to ask. We love e-mails!

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I promise that article about the gear we use at weddings will finally hit the blog one of these Fridays! But please hang in there with me — we’ve been in Virginia all week, shooting engagement sessions when we’re not spending time with family, and working off only one computer while we’re here. So things have been a little crazier than usual!

Since I couldn’t get that put together int time for you this morning, I decided to share something that has become more and more important to Danny and me in our business, and something that I think would benefit every photography business: Sharing the wedding pictures we take with the other vendors who put the wedding together.

Let me run a little disclaimer up front. I haven’t always been the best about following through with delivering photos to the other vendors, although I do my very best to credit everyone on my blog. If the vendors don’t follow up with me, asking for photos, sometimes I simply forget to get them sent to every single one — since there’s a lot of work that goes into finalizing wedding pictures and delivering them to just the bride and groom. I always want to share photos, for several reasons I’ll explain below. But I just want to put it out there: If you’re a wedding professional who worked on a wedding I shot and you never got any pictures, send me an email and I’ll get them to you!

Now, back to the whys of sharing our pictures. I think it’s important to give the other vendors access to these photos — at no charge — because:

1. Without the work these professionals created, we wouldn’t have had anything to photograph at the wedding.
2. They don’t charge us a fee to photograph the work they created, so I don’t think it’s right to charge them a fee to let them use the pictures of their work from an event for which we were all hired.
3. I want to help other wedding professionals’ businesses, and the best way I can do that is by providing quality photos they can use for promotional purposes and in their portfolios; other wedding professionals can routinely produce top-notch work, but without excellent photographs displaying that work, prospective clients will never know.
4. Fellow wedding professionals are far more likely to recommend me to their couples if I have a proven track record of not only producing good images, but of helping them.
5. Sharing my pictures with other wedding professionals cannot hurt my business; it can only help both our businesses.

There you have it. My reasons for sharing. And for not charging to hand over the pictures.

Whether to charge or not charge, and whether to watermark or not watermark are hot topics I’ve heard debated time and again between photographers. I fall firmly into the “don’t” and “don’t” camps because of reason # 2. Photographers who want to charge usage fees or “protect” their images with watermarks sometimes argue that, since photographs are the copyrighted property of that photographer, it’s only fair for them to charge for the images or leave a highly visible watermark on the picture so the photographer always gets credit.

But I can see it from the point of view of my fellow wedding professionals — the venues, the caterers, the florists and musicians. They create something unique for each wedding every bit as much as we photographers do. But they don’t own a copyright on their creations; the law doesn’t work that way. Just imagine for a moment though that they did. Imagine that a floral designer wanted to charge you to use images of his floral arrangements in your magazine ad; imagine that a makeup artist demanded her logo be prominently watermarked on each picture of the bride that you share on your website.

You would be upset, right? Because you wouldn’t feel it’s fair to have to pay to share your own work with prospective clients, and because you wouldn’t feel it’s a good reflection on your business’s brand to have someone else’s logo popping up on your website. So why should other wedding professionals feel any differently about our photography?

I’m a big believer in sharing our talents, and that it makes all our businesses better for it. But I’ll get off my soapbox now. If you’re a photographer who agrees with me, I’m glad to hear you’re on board with constantly building up our industry. If you’re a photographer who disagrees with me, that’s okay, too — but I would urge you to consider what you gain by not sharing your images, and what you and so many others stand to lose. You don’t have to change your mind. Just consider it.

I want everything I do to benefit my family, my clients, my business, and the community at large. And I hope — no matter how you run your business — that you do, too.

Happy weekend, everyone!

~ Laura