When Ben first emailed me about shooting his wedding, he said he would rather have a few really good images than a lot of mediocre images. I guess that’s what sadly will often define the difference between the film and digital age. A lot of people will take 1000′s of image but they never spend time on a single image and end up never getting anything great.
That statement became the obvious precursor to his request to shoot some of the wedding and the engagement photos using medium format films cameras. My first SLR was a film camera, and I used to shoot a lot of 35mm when I was in school. So the thought of going back to film just sounded like too much fun!
We decided that it wasn’t worth the risk to shoot the engagement session or the wedding in 100% film, but it would be fun to do some of both. We figured we could use the engagement session to practice and see how it went and we ended up heading down to Union Station in LA with 4 camera’s
1. 1960′s Medium Format Rolleiflex with some Fuji Pro400H, Illford HP5, and Kodak E100G Film. We tried push processing some of the black and white and things didn’t work out so well. But the slide film came out beautiful. I’ll point out a photo of the Rolleiflex below. But it was a lot of fun looking at everything through the top and focusing with the manual knob. You can tell which photos are off this camera because they are all square.
2. 1960′s Leica M3 Rangefinder with T-Max 400. These always throw me off a little because they aren’t SLR and neither the Rolleiflex or the Leica have a built in lightmeter. So I ended up metering with my digital and then basing the Leica settings based on that.
3. My 1980′s Canon A1 35mm. I’ve shot with this a lot before. But the battery for the light meter was dead so I ended up using the light meter on my digital also.
4. One of my good old Canon 1D Mark IIIs. The funny thing is I really doubt in 50 years anyone will still be using this camera, whereas people will still be using the fun old medium format ones.
I really love some of the ones off the Rolleiflex, but I will let you judge for yourself. The funny thing is that some of the color ones look so good you can’t tell they’re not digital. Or maybe I should say the digital ones look so good you can’t tell they’re not film?
This is Ben taking photos of me as I took photos of him. =)
The rest from here on are digital
This is what it looks like looking through the Rolleiflex. You focus with the little knob on the left and all the settings are on the front.
Boy can Ben leap!
These come from the genius mind of Ben himself. I LOVE the perspective and love the idea. I can’t wait for their wedding to see what happens there! 
