Why I Shoot Film in 2024

If you’re a millennial like me, you’ll recall that for most of our childhood film was the only option available. All my family photographs growing up were shot on film. But those days are long gone right? Well, not quite. Not for me anyway! And if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, I’ll take you on a little trip down memory lane and do my best to explain why…

I’m not one of those photographers who first picked up a camera when they were toddling around in nappies. Naturally my parents took pictures of my brother and I as children (exhibit A above!), but not many. Film was costly, so they weren’t trigger happy and I certainly don’t remember ever showing any interest in photography other than a mild curiosity when they picked the prints up from Boots.

It wasn’t until my 18th birthday that I was given my first digital “point and shoot” camera and whilst I remember it well and the immediacy was certainly a game-changer, it didn’t spark a fire in me. As a school leaver in the noughties I did what everybody else was doing and took myself off to Australasia for a while. In all my time exploring on the other side of the world I took only 250 pictures and mediocre ones at that, including this one of Karl and Susan Kennedy’s house on ‘Ramsay street’ which gives you a flavour of the sort of high quality subject matter I was focusing on!

In fact I didn’t show any serious interest at all in photography until I was at Uni and beginning to question what had been a lifelong dream to become an architect. Photography became my antedote to architecture, in that it as a creative outlet it gave me the immediate reward I had come to crave. With digital cameras, that reward literally was immediate!

I was twenty when I invested in a DSLR and it wasn’t until three years into my photography business, that I became curious about the “redundant” photographic process of shooting film. I had chronic imposter syndrome as a new photographer and I felt it was something I should know more about. I wanted to turn the clock back and discover more about shooting film, so I bagged myself a spot on Jon Canlas’ ‘Film Is Not Dead’ workshop in London in 2011 and was totally inspired.

This workshop was a pretty big deal at the time and deservedly so. I came away captivated by the entire process of shooting film from loading a new roll into the camera, to hearing the mechanism of that film physically turning after every shot has been magically captured, to receiving my beautiful high resolution scans back from the pro lab I still work with in California.  

I had been spending hours and hours editing my digital work and knew I would never be able to match the beautiful grain and the rich, luminous aesthetic that I saw in that first batch of film. Other than the odd bit of straightening or cropping, there was no editing required. I realised early on in my film journey that if I nailed my settings in camera, these images were going to come back reliably gorgeous!

It may sound obvious, but I learned that shooting film was about crafting a great photograph with a camera. There was nowhere to hide if the composition was off or the exposure wasn’t right. You couldn’t distract the viewer of a bad photograph with a funky colour-drenching photoshop action or any other fancy post-production techniques. You just had to be a good photographer. Simple.

As I shot more and more film over digital in my work as a wedding photographer, I began to take pictures more purposefully. I have a busy mind by nature, but photography is now one of the places I try to slow things down and choose quality over quantity; analogue over digital, grain over pixels and heirlooms over disposables. 

The calm pace of shooting, the magical process of development and the rich aesthetic of the final images are what make film photographs stand out from the crowd.  It may seem old school in the age of the iPhone, but choosing film over digital allows me to create my best work for my clients and that’s all that matters to me.

One of these photographs is not like the others… can you spot the odd one out?

If you’re curious to dig deeper check out my 10 Reasons You Want To Be Photographed on Film, it’s worth a read!