April 24, 2015

Emily Speer | Savannah Ga Senior Portrait Photographer

FILED IN: Portraits

I have adopted a new “baby” to my gear collection! I recently acquired a Pentax 645N which is a medium format film camera. It is magical! I was dying to use it for my styled shoot for Modern Luxury Brides Magazine the day after I received it but I needed to shoot a test roll to make sure everything worked okay. Of course I called Emily to come shoot with me since she is my neighbor, creative and oh so fun to hang out with. When I walked up to the counter to pick up my scans all I could think was “oh my goodness… what if I did everything wrong or my camera is broken and the images come back awful?” I literally happy danced my way out the door when I saw these! And totally understood what my film shooting friends said about how addictive medium format film is! It made me want to ditch every piece of digital equipment that I own. (But I won’t!)

To explain film to my non-photographer nerd friends: believe it or not most magazine images are shot on film! The tones are so dreamy! Film scans also means no editing for me since the images look so killer via film. So I shoot a roll of 120 film- which is bigger negatives than 35mm then send it to a lab in California. They develop the images and then use a super high tech scanner to convert the film into digital format. Then they send those files to me. So when I say I will shoot some film at your wedding, portrait session etc it will still be in jpg format just like usual… they are just amped on the gorgeous factor a bit. Film is super expensive though- it costs about $40 plus shipping for a box of 5 rolls of film and I get 16 shots per roll. So I am much more intentional about styling, posing these shots since they are pretty pricey per shot. The cost of shipping the film, developing and scanning is pretty high as well. It’s $18/roll plus shipping. So why take all of the additional, expensive measures? The beauty of it is completely worth it!

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