San Francisco Film Wedding Photographer

Does anybody still use film for wedding photography anymore? Never fear. The answer is yes! Hazel Photo is a San Francisco film wedding photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Does Hazel Photo use film for the whole wedding? No. That would be cost prohibitive, and frankly a bit scary for the fast paced parts of the day, and in low light settings. Hazel Photo uses the hybrid technique–Some film and some digital mixed together.

There aren’t many wedding photographers using film anymore in San Francisco. Why would anybody want to? For one thing it makes a photographer slow down and think. Many photographers who cover weddings with digital cameras take more than 5000 photographs over the course of an 8 hour wedding. With digital it doesn’t cost anymore to snap another picture, so the photographer takes another and another. Maybe one of them will be spot on, but there isn’t the same careful thought behind that spray and pray style. Digital photography can encourage a laziness about framing and timing. Film forces the photographer to think more precisely about those things. This can create the most important and lasting images from your wedding.

There are a great number of advantages to digital photography, especially in low light settings, and especially with flash. It is easy to see if the lighting is working by looking at the back of the camera. Clearly one cannot do this with film photography. But there are other reasons to make film wedding photographs, and thankfully there are still people doing so in the San Francisco Bay Area. The difference between film and digital photography is a bit like the difference between a record player and an mp3 player, or, if you must, a loss-less format like FLAC. Analog sound recording performs a natural clipping at the top of the range. Digital is unable to accomplish that natural clipping. The same is true with film, the chemical process of exposing film, and then processing in developer allows for an effortlessly natural color palette and a beautiful dynamic range.