05/19/2026
I’ve been wanting to add film to my wedding photography offerings for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on a Nikon F100 camera so that I could use some of the older lenses I already own with it.
I casually shot a few rolls over the past couple months to get a feel for the camera and started dialing in my own at-home scanning set up. I don’t always love lab scans so I’ve been researching a way to make it efficient at the higher volumes that go along with weddings, and it feels like the pieces are falling into place.
This here is the first real job, a small elopement, that I brought my film camera along to as a first test run and I shot sparingly throughout, just a couple rolls, while primarily shooting digital.
Switching back and forth between film and digital is a little tricky because with film you don’t have the crazy high ISOs of digital that allow you to shot in really dark environments. So you have to mentally switch gears. On this day down at the Redwood Deck, it was quite overcast and dark beneath the trees, so I think I was shooting at about ~1/50th of a second out of necessity for most of these shots, which is crazy for movement, and kind risky handheld, but I made it work.
Just a couple days later, I shot about 5 rolls at a large wedding, which really put my setup and my new balancing act to the test, so I’m looking forward to posting those in the coming days.
There have definitely been some hiccups along the way, but I feel like I’m learning something new about this new process every day.
While there’s a little bit of motion blur and not everything is perfectly in focus, it’s teaching me to let go of the need for everything to be perfect and lean more into the organic qualities.
