Shooting Film

 We love shooting film and we’ve loved shooting it since the 90s.

Many people think film is outdated or it’s dead or a lost art, but in professional photography, it’s really experiencing a resurgence in popularity and is now a contemporary, niche way of capturing images.

Once again, we’ve begun to incorporate film into our shoots, using both film and digital during our photo sessions. We shoot on Hasselblad H1 medium format film cameras or for digital, we work with Hasselblad H5D's.

Film vs. Digital?

Film gives a timeless look to your images. Here are a few reasons we love shooting film in addition to digital.

• Some people feel images shot on film are more atmospheric and romantic, others love it because of the nostalgic grain in the photos, the depth of the images, and the highlights.
• The colours on film are beautiful – creating a greater dynamic range of colour in daylight. Prints have a beautiful, rich texture.
• Film has more latitude with exposure. With digital you can lose the highlights in the shots (for example the detail in the sky or in the lace of a white wedding dress) but in film you can overexpose, keeping those all important details.

On the other hand, film is unable to capture clean images in low light without a flash, tripod, or long shutter! So there’s definitely a place for digital images.

As film shots are limited (and much more expensive to process), shooting film forces us, as photographers, to slow down and be more thoughtful about each shot we take. So, instead of taking lots of digital images – more thought goes into each photo that we take on film. This ability to think more about each shot allows us to be more creative and to ‘get it right in camera’. The upside of getting it right is that it can save time when we’re editing because the photos are nearly perfect(!) when we receive the scans back from our lab. We spend less time in the studio editing, and more time capturing, creating and shooting images!