How To Take Great Photos Of Friends (Whether You Know Them Or Not)

The Big Difference

Friends and models act very differently infront of a camera and the difference in styles and end results vary, depending on your subject. Typically, models are a lot more comfortable having a camera pointed at them for hours, are more relaxed in their clothes and take less time to ‘warm up’ to taking photos. Friends (whether you know them or not), are typically amateur, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make excellent subjects, in fact their natural relaxation and chemistry often creates much more interesting photos.

The Warm Up

The first thing you’ll notice when you take photos of friends, whether they’re your friends or not, is that they’re not usually as comfortable infront of a camera and are going to require some warm up time. When I say warm up, I don’t mean it literally, I mean that you need to talk to them and get them to relax a little while you’re setting up and taking some test shots. 1 thing i’ve noticed with professional models and friends, is that even pros get their best photos towards the end of the day, when they’re comfortable in the clothes that they’re wearing and how they’re posing.

At the beginning of the day it’s important to start taking photos straight away so that they’re used to the camera, whilst not being too intrusive or taking any compromising photos. As a photographer, they need to be able to trust you to take good photos of them, and not embarrassing ones; whether you’re going to delete them or not, people don’t like bad photos of themselves. This is one of the ways that friends will differ to professional models.

All the basic rules apply from my post on working with a model, but I find that the number 1 way to help someone to relax it to joke around with them and make them laugh, and because you’re taking ‘friend photos’, photos of this happening create some excellent results.

Location

For the sake of all good photography everywhere, please do not use flat lighting on a plain white background – it has it’s uses, but this is certainly not one of them. You have the freedom to go wherever you want to take photos, so make it somewhere interesting. It’s often easy to overlook interesting locations, but you’ll be surprised what you can come up with if you limit yourself to just a small area. For the photos I took for this blog post, I used a friend’s house and different locations within the house to produce a small selection of contrasting, yet interesting images.

It’s usually a bit of a struggle to think of somewhere when you first start a shoot, so just choose anywhere you like and take inspiration from that. Sometimes, once i’ve found inspiration, I like to hide the locations and techniques that I originally used, and progress from there. The photo below was actually taken on a trampoline, but I decided after a while not to include the trampoline in the shot and just go for the effects that came with it, which resulted in some really fun photos, that don’t have the distraction of the prop used to take them.

Take Breaks

Even if you’ve only been hired for a couple hours, still try and convince the client that the best thing for them to do is to take breaks so that you can both relax and come back into the shoot again with fresh ideas. During these breaks, they can change outfits, come up with new locations and you can carry on shooting the whole thing.

If you’re selling the photos as a day of photography, then your client or friend will likely want to change their clothes a lot and breaks allow them time to do this, without having to worry about being under the pressure of a camera the whole time. It also allows you to put some photos onto your computer so that they’re backed up and your client can see them and decide what they like and don’t like about them, helping to improve your result and likelihood of sales.

This is also a good time to be taking photos as you’ll catch the models off guard, and ultimately, a little bit more relaxed. These photos are going to have a different style to them, but that’s the good thing about shooting on digital, you don’t have to worry about the amount of photos that you’ve taken. A different perspective when taking photos is good, as you can never be too sure what your client is going to like until they see them.

Photo Reproduction

One of my favourite things to do when shooting clients who have been friends for a long time is to recreate one of their old embarrassing photos from the past, and this works especially well if they we’re children when it was taken. It can be a little time consuming when working with multiple models, and the lighting and location is going to be hard to get perfect, but give it enough time and you’ll produce some really interesting results.

The photo below took about 30 mins of preparation and shooting to complete, and it was never going to be spot on, but the important thing is that the clients absolutely loved it. A small amount of post processing can fix certain lighting situations, but try to get the focal length right as that will effect the perspective, which can’t be fixed in post.

There’s No Bad Photos

If your clients are having fun when they’re trying to pose, chances are that they’re going to be laughing and ruining the shot that you were originally going for, but I urge you to carry on shooting as you never quite know what it’s going to look like. Often, I prefer these photos as you can tell that the photo wasn’t forced and the subject is having fun.

For the photo below, I had my camera set to aperture priority at f/3.5 and the shutter speed set itself to 1/160s which unfortunately wasn’t quite fast enough to capture the sudden movement, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good photo, i’m actually quite pleased with how it came out, it’s just something to look out for if you wan’t to be prepared for this.

Have Fun

Whether you’re working on a commission, hired for the day, or just taking photos of friends, the most important thing to remember is that you should have fun. I don’t mean this in a soppy way, I mean that people remember the time that a photo was taken, and they know if they were enjoying themselves or not, so if you want to try and sell these photos, or just give them to friend’s, it’s important that they associate the photos with having fun as they’re far more likely to enjoy them. That is what sells a photo like this.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you. As always, if you have any photos that you feel could be used on this website, click on the ‘submit a photo’ section at the top and have your images seen by thousands. Enjoy!

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