Daniel & Katherine’s Wedding – Des Moines West End Architectural Salvage

I have something a little different from normal to share today.  A while back I got it into my head that it would be a fun and uniquely challenging experience to shoot a wedding exclusively in black and white film.  Film is  something I’m still very new to though and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of doing this as a primary for someones wedding.  The obvious solution was to see if I could second shoot for someone.  The pressure would be significantly less to deliver as I worked outside my digital comfort zone, and I suspected that  the B&W film aesthetic would complement the primaries coverage nicely.  I approached Daniel Dunlap with the idea and he was trusting and gracious enough to have me out for Daniel & Katherine’s wedding at the West End Architectural Salvage building in Des Moines, IA.

Before I jump into the images I know a reasonable question you might have is “why film?” or “why not just convert your digital files to black and white?”.  This project certainly had expenses that wouldn’t exist had I shot on my DSLR’s and made digital B&W conversions.  There were a couple of different payoffs I was hoping for out of the experience to make it worth my while.

First, clearly the process for shooting film is a lot different than digital.  I was curious whether being restricted on the number of frames I had to work with and the lack of immediate feedback (no LCD) would help me slow my approach and be more measured in my shooting.  Could I cover a wedding day with a restricted number of rolls of film, 36 frames at a time?   Would any of that change in shooting style carry over to my digital work and make me a more intentioned photographer?

Next, I suspected that the results I would get in terms of image tonality and grain aesthetic would be different than I can easily achieve with digital conversions.  It’s easy to spend a ton of time tweaking digital B&W conversions to get the effect you want.  I have VSCO presets to emulate B&W film (and I love their Tri-x conversion) but there’s aspects of the conversions that don’t quite match real film.

Which leads me to authenticity.  I love black and white images, however I somewhat dislike the process of choosing which images to convert.  I’ve seen the image in color and it’s sometimes easy to second guess the conversion.  “Should I have delivered that in color instead?  I prefer it in black and white but maybe the client won’t?”  There’s none of that ambiguity with the following images.  They were all captured on a genuinely black and white medium, intended from the outset to be presented this way.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun making these.  I hope I get to do this again.

Photo geeks:

Bronica ETRsi w/ 75 2.8 | Ilford Hp5

Canon Elan 7e w/ 35 1.4, 50 1.4, 70-200 2.8 | Kodak Tri-x, Fuji Neopan 400 (both +1-2 stops)