My grandmother bought me my very first camera. It was a little blue digital camera, and I loved it.
It wasn’t fancy. It didn’t have a million technical capabilities. But it did take pictures, and that’s what mattered. I took pictures of everything I saw, though I will spare us all a look at those early photos. My grandmother sadly passed just a few months after gifting me that camera.
About five years later, I was photographing my first wedding. The next year I photographed two more, and every year I was unexpectedly blessed by capturing more couples exchange their vows. As my business began to grow, I was unsure of whether to expand in photography and pursue it further, or slow down to focus on my full-time teaching job. In that season of indecisiveness, years after my grandmother had passed, my aunt gifted me something unexpected: my grandmother’s two 35mm film cameras.
The timing felt intentional. Like a hand on my shoulder saying, keep going.
While I’ve upgraded my equipment since that first camera she bought me – and probably would not trust it to photograph a wedding, let alone a session – I start to bring those film cameras with me. They became an opportunity to learn another medium in the field I grew deeply to love, but more importantly, they became an opportunity to bring her with me. A piece of her becoming a part of every wedding and session seemed only fitting to honor the woman who brought me to this work in the first place.
Every photographer that shoots film has their reason, whether it be they love the specific aesthetic of the grain, color rendition, and tonal quality, or they find joy in analog processes in an increasingly digital world, or perhaps it is simply what they learned on and feels like home. These are all wonderful reasons, and there are plenty more as well.
I certainly do not shoot film because I claim to know everything about it. And I do not shoot film because it’s trendy.
I shoot film because it refocuses me in a way that digital does not. You don’t get instant feedback. You don’t get endless chances to get it right. Every frame costs time, money, attention. It requires presence.
That restraint matters to me. When my grandmother held these film cameras, she was not capturing every moment she saw, taking photo after photo just because she could. She was capturing a select few that she wanted to be sure she would be able to remember, and captures those moments was worth the investment to her.
When I photograph a wedding, I’m not just thinking about how it looks today. I’m thinking about how it will feel decades from now, when a grandchild pulls an album off a shelf, or when a photograph becomes one of the few tangible pieces of a family’s early story.
In that way, film feels deeply appropriate. It’s physical. It’s archival. It’s patient. It’s meant to last.
And on a personal level, it carries something even deeper. When I shoot film, my grandmother is present. Her cameras, her legacy, her belief in me are woven into the work itself.
I shoot film because I believe stories are worth slowing down for.
Because love deserves care.
Because legacy isn’t rushed.
