Doubt that anyone recalls but about two years ago I was really excited about the possibility of going back to my roots of shooting in film. Here’s the post about the first film roll I shot with my antique Rolleicord III twin lens reflex camera. I picked up this awesome vintage camera and 100 rolls of expired film to play with. It was exciting! But time went on and I just kinda put the project on the sidelines. Mainly because of the lack of time during weddings. It’s a lot easier to pick up my trusty digital Nikon D700 with it’s incredible speed and my awesome line of prime lenses than to mess around with a vintage camera that takes two minutes just to take one shot. Trying to focus that thing is a pain! The other factor is, processing film is super expensive. I dropped almost 20 dollars just to process two rolls of medium format film without prints. I tend to shoot a lot photos at weddings with digital, typically I shoot around 2500 photos. Some of you are thinking HOlY S***T, that a lot! Well, it is a lot, but in my defense, why the hell not! Memory cards are super cheap compared to the cost of film and my post processing is fairly simple.
At one of my recent wedding, I brought along my Rolleicord and shot a couple of rolls. It was a hit or miss, remember that the film expired so I really didn’t know what to expect. But that really wasn’t an issue, the whole reason to shoot some film was to get away from the perfect world of digital. If you notice there is a huge crowd of photographers that intentionally imitate the look and feel of film and call it ‘vintage’. So I figured why not just do it the old fashion way. I remember getting yelled at by my photography teacher for having dust spots on my prints and nowadays is cool… Ironic.
Would I ever shoot an entire wedding on film? NAH! I really love my trusty Nikon, digital is way awesome. And I can honestly say that 90% of clients could care less if the wedding is shot on film or digital. Nor that they can tell the difference. I do like the artistic feel to it, and once in a while I will most definitely embrace film. It’s nice to keep things spiced up, otherwise it just becomes work. It’s my passion.
So here’s a couple of shots from the two rolls of film.
by Edric Morales