Category: Film

For the last few years I’ve picked a time during my season that was a little slower and approached my photographer friends to see if I could tag along to one of their weddings.  The caveat being that I’d be shooting strictly with black & white film.  Two years ago Daniel Dunlap took me along to Des Moines (link to blog), last year Hooton Images put up with me in Lincoln (sadly I procrastinated on blogging, maybe I’ll just eventually post it out of order 😛 ).  This year Christine McGuigan had me out to the Holland Center for Ali & Casey’s wedding.

The first year I did this I had a couple of different motivations for doing it.  You can read about those in the post I linked above.  For the second year, and increasingly for this year the motivation really just became having fun and challenging myself a bit with a process outside my comfort zone.  One of the things I tell myself periodically about photography is that if I’m not having fun, I shouldn’t be doing it.  I definitely had a blast this year and I’m looking forward to doing it again.

Thanks again Christine & Jennie for having me out, and congrats to Ali & Casey!  Here’s some of my favorites from the day!

Photo nerd stuff:
Canon Elan 7e w/ 20 f2.8, 35 f1.4, 85 f1.4, 135 f2 | Kodak Tri-X @ 400 & 800

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)