Every wedding I photograph, somewhere between the ceremony and the speeches, I swap my digital camera for an old Leica loaded with a single roll of Kodak Tri-X. Thirty-six frames. No preview, no second tries.
Couples sometimes ask why. The honest answer is that it changes how I see. With a memory card I can afford to shoot everything; with film I have to wait — and waiting is where photographs come from.
The discipline of thirty-six
When you only have thirty-six frames, you stop photographing the obvious. You stop taking the same picture of the cake that everyone else is taking. You look for the moment just after: the hand that lingers on a shoulder, the brother wiping his eyes and pretending he isn’t.
Film doesn’t make pictures better. It makes the photographer slower, and slower is usually better.
What couples actually get
- Twenty to thirty hand-printed frames in a linen box.
- High-resolution scans in the online gallery.
- The contact sheet itself — every frame, including the misses.
That last one is my favourite. A contact sheet is the most honest document of a day: you can see where I hesitated, where I moved closer, where I got lucky. Most couples frame it.
Does it cost extra?
No. It’s part of how I work, and it’s included in every wedding package. If you would rather I didn’t, I won’t — but nobody has said that yet.
