A fair amount of people laugh when I tell them I still shoot with film. Relegated to hipsters and grandpas (and the rest just use Instagram filters), film use in wedding and portraiture gets written off as inconvenient, costly, and in the digital age, frankly insensible. I won’t argue that any of the aforementioned aren’t necessarily true, but film is very important to me. Film kept me taking pictures when I was about ready to give up on photography altogether.
I had a trusty digital Nikon as a teenager. That Nikon travelled everywhere with me, whether it was to the mountains of Switzerland or to the corner store to capture my brother in that oh-so-awesome side-of-the-building-light (srs biz photographer problems). When that age-old Nikon began to give me trouble, I became so disheartened. My sidekick had let me down. Though it probably could have easily been serviced, I was too busy being bitter about it. I wanted something I could really trust; my digital camera had not just become my constant documentation companion, but a social crutch – in any social setting, I would hide behind my camera, documenting every passing moment instead of living IN the moment. It was easier not to talk much.
I had no choice but to turn to the cameras I used briefly before my dive into the digital world: both two beautiful old, but trusty, film cameras. And just like that, my whole world lit up.
Photographs suddenly bounced off the page like I’d never experienced with digital. No Photoshop was necessary, no special settings. The one-hour developing was agonizing, but the payoff was worth it: to see my photographs I had imagined, planned, and dreamed about until they were developed, still warm in my hands, was like early Christmas. I simply couldn’t believe that it had taken me so long to discover all that film had to offer.
More importantly, film taught me to slow down. It taught me to stop documenting EVERY moment and instead, choose the right moment. It taught me to think carefully and lovingly about every photograph I would take. Because film is more limiting in its nature, as opposed to the bottomless pit that is digital photography, I learned to leave my camera at home sometimes, and stop obsessing with hiding behind it. Instead of firing off hundreds of photographs in a night, just to pick out a few good ones later, it taught me to set limits on myself and challenge myself to make every photo the best that it could be. Film taught me to make every moment count.
Though I’m primarily a digital photographer for my wedding and portraiture work, I always shoot film throughout. Perhaps some day, I’ll shoot only film, as I did those few glorious summers. But for now, I’m going to slow down, take a breath, and make every moment count.
Here are some of my favorites, featuring the people and places I love – my best friends, my now fiancé, downtown Chicago, my brother and best friend Victor, and my beloved city of Detroit.
