A wedding photographed entirely on 35mm film.
Not made to look like film afterwards. Not a digital wedding with a few rolls added around the edges. The whole thing, from getting ready to the dance floor, was shot on Kodak Gold 200.
Oliver is a director and Zoe is a screenwriter, so photography was never going to be an afterthought. They both went to film school, as had what seemed like half the guests. I don’t think I’ve ever photographed a wedding with quite so many cameras pointed in quite so many directions.
Which, obviously, meant the sensible thing was to photograph the whole day on film.
Wellington Wood gave us a ceremony in the trees, canvas tents, open fields, children vanishing into the woods and a swing large enough to become briefly dangerous. The day already had its own visual language. It didn’t need organising into one.
I wanted real colour, hard summer light, deep woodland shadows, movement, grain and the occasional edge of the negative left exactly where it landed. No digital safety net. No preset designed to look vaguely analogue afterwards.
Film looks like film.
It felt like the right way to photograph two people whose lives revolve around pictures, surrounded by a congregation who knew exactly what a camera was doing—and mostly managed to get on with the wedding anyway.
