Why I Shoot Weddings on Film — And Why You Should Want Fewer Photographs

There is a moment near the end of every wedding I shoot — usually twenty minutes before the last of the light leaves — when I deliberately stop working. I lower the camera and let the two of them stand there in it. It is often the best photograph of the day, and I do not always take it.

That instinct is what film taught me, and it is the real reason I still shoot it.

What a roll of film actually costs

A roll of 35mm gives me thirty-six frames. Thirty-six. I load it, I shoot it, I rewind it, and it goes into a pocket where it stays until it is scanned, weeks later. There is no screen to check. No histogram, no second attempt at the same expression. If I miss, I have missed, and I will not know until long after everyone has flown home.

Couples assume I choose film for the look — the softness in the highlights, the way it renders skin, the grain that sits over a room like dust in a shaft of light. That is part of it and I will not pretend otherwise. Colour negative film handles a Thai afternoon in a way no sensor quite manages: it holds the white of a dress in full sun and still finds the detail in the dark wool of the suit standing beside it.

But the look is the smaller half. The larger half is what thirty-six frames do to the person holding the camera. They make me wait. They make me choose. They turn a wedding day from something I am recording into something I am reading.

The unpopular part: your gallery should be smaller

Here is the thing I say to couples that they are never expecting, and that plenty of photographers will disagree with me on.

You do not want a thousand photographs. You want sixty.

The industry has quietly turned volume into a proxy for value. Eight hundred images. Twelve hundred. Two shooters, three bodies, everything delivered. It sounds generous. It is the opposite. A gallery that size is not a record of your wedding, it is an unedited drive handed over with the work left undone. Somewhere inside it are the forty frames that actually are your wedding, and you will never find them, because nobody was willing to make the decision on your behalf. You will scroll it twice in the first month and then leave it alone for a decade.

The editing is the job. Deciding what not to show you is the job. When I deliver a wedding I have already thrown away the frame where the smile is nearly there, the one where the light is nearly right, the near-miss you would have kept out of politeness. What is left is shorter, and it holds.

And the other unpopular part: I do direct people

There is a second idea I would like to put down gently, and it is the one about the pure observer — the photographer who never speaks, never intervenes, simply drifts through the day taking what happens. I have read that promise on a hundred websites. Some of them belong to people whose work I admire.

I do not entirely believe it, and I do not practise it. I work quietly, and for most of a wedding I am the least interesting person in the room, which is exactly where I want to be. But at some point in the evening I will take the two of you away from your guests, walk you out to wherever the light has gone, and tell you where to stand. Not how to smile. Where to stand, which way to face, and then I leave you alone inside it.

That is not staging. It is the difference between hoping that the best twenty minutes of light in the whole day happens to find you, and making certain that it does. The photographs couples end up living with — the one in the hallway, the one their children will eventually inherit — almost always come out of those twenty minutes.

Where the two meet

Film slows me down. A little quiet direction makes the slow part count. Between the two of them there is very little room left for the nine hundred photographs nobody asked for.

So I shoot fewer frames than most, deliver fewer than almost anyone, and spend the weeks afterwards deciding which of them survive. What you receive is a small set of pictures that should outlive everyone standing in them.

The roll ends, and that is the whole of it.