All or nothing! That’s me. My photography journey started around 9 years ago when I fell down the rabbit hole of ‘how to be a better photographer’, prior to that I had no interest at all, nothing. I had never owned a stand alone camera, I just used the one on my phone if I needed to, or let everyone else take the photos. I just had no passion for it.

It was the middle of 2014 when my whole life was about to change forever. My wife and I found out we were pregnant with our first child and, like most people, we had no idea what to do. We started to research online and invest in books, giving us ideas and inspiration on ‘what to do when your little one arrives’.

There was generally some good advice in there, but we came across a golden nugget that would completely change my path. The advice was to ‘invest in a decent digital camera and learn to use it before your child is born so you can document them as they grow up’. We thought this was a great idea, so we went out to see what was available in a sensible price range and came home with a Nikon D3200 with two lenses (I can’t remember what they were, but they worked for us).

As soon as I got the camera out of the box I was obsessed. There was something about it that just made me want to take pictures. I set it to manual mode (as I said, I’m all or nothing) and started learning how to use it. I was taking pictures of everything, and when I wasn’t taking pictures I was reading articles online or watching videos teaching me the exposure triangle, the rule of thirds, leading lines, and all the other rules of photography,

For a couple of years I continued to take pictures of everything I could. The camera went with me everywhere, and I started to increase my kit bag with new lenses, flashes, and filters. Fairly soon though I realised I don’t like scrolling through menus to change settings, and I found the D3200 to be too small for my hands. I traded it in for a much older but more professional D300. This camera was well used but was bigger and had ergonomically placed controls for all the main settings that I would use. I absolutely loved this camera, but with it came my sudden and unexpected loss of love for digital photography.

In my research about all things photography, I had already come across some articles about analogue (film) photography making a return and found myself to be intrigued. There was a cult following of film photographers, and I loved the idea of the community. At the same time I hit a heavy wall with digital. I found I was just taking pictures of anything, knowing that I could edit and manipulate the images later in photoshop, making everything vibrant and sharp, but ultimately, to me, the image was boring. It had nothing. No soul, no character, no real subject. People were commenting on how good the images looked, but I knew it was just the vibrancy of the colours that was doing it.

I had always looked in the second hand section of local camera shops to see if there were any bargains (that was where I found my trusty D300 after all), and I had started to see more and more vintage analogue cameras. In one shop that I went into, there were three cameras that caught my eye. There was an old Leica, and Olympus OM1, and a Pentax K2. All three were similar prices, and originally I went for the Olympus, but when I tried it out it didn’t quite feel right. The Leica was too old for me at the time (probably worth a lot more money now though!) so I tried out the Pentax. I was surprised by the weight of it; it felt solid and comfortably heavy. There was dust in the viewfinder, and it felt old (it was from the mid 70’s), but it seemed to work absolutely fine. It also came with a 50mm f1.4 lens, which completely sold it for me. I bought it as a Christmas present for myself, so put it away until then.

*Vevey, Switzerland. One of my first analogue pictures; taken with my Pentax K2 using Kodak Ektar 100 film.*

When I finally got to put the first roll of film in it (some Kodak Colorplus) I was excited and terrified at the same time. What if it didn’t work? What if I wasn’t a good enough photographer to get good images out of it? Was it going to be an expensive waste of time? It did slow me down though. It taught me to take my time and think about what I was going to shoot before I tried to shoot it. It gave me a completely different view on photography,

When I finished the roll, I sent it away to be developed and waited anxiously for over a week for them to come back. When the link to my digital files finally arrived I had huge butterflies in my stomach. Luckily, most of my images turned out a lot better than I had expected, I won’t say they were great as I still had so much learning to do but I realised at that point that all I was interested in was film. I loved the look of them, I loved the feel of them, and I loved the sense of achievement that they gave me. I had a holiday to Switzerland coming up, the Pentax was coming with me.

I took a couple of rolls of film with me and all I wanted to do was to be out and about, taking pictures. The scenery was amazing, and it felt so good to be capturing it on 35mm film. I burned through a couple of rolls in a few days and couldn’t wait for them to be developed. This time I was a lot happier with more of my pictures, it felt like I was starting to really get to grips with it, and it made me a lot more sensitive to what I had done wrong. With digital, you can take a picture on the settings you think are right and then have a look at the screen, if you aren’t happy with the results you can adjust and take the picture again, and repeat until you have an image you are happy with. With film you don’t have that luxury, and by the time the roll is finished and developed it is very likely you would have completely forgotten what settings the camera was on when you took the picture. You can take field notes, I tried to do this for the first couple of rolls using the notes app on my phone, but something went wrong and the notes went out of sync, I didn’t bother after that!

*Rochers de Naye, Switzerland. Taken on my second visit to Switzerland with my Pentax K2 on Fuji C200.*

In the five years since, I have felt myself become a better photographer, Obviously this is subjective, photography is art, and beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder, but I had a much better understanding of ‘how’ it all worked. I have nothing against digital, and I believe that image editing is very much an art form in itself, it’s just not an art form that I enjoy. I love thinking about what I want to shoot, and then calculating what I need to do to create the image that I have in my head. I am however, very much into the beauty of ‘real’. For me, the soul of the image is in the subject, and the way the image is put together. Grain doesn’t bother me, neither do the images where someone isn’t looking or something is happening in the background. I will look at what I am getting a picture of, so there shouldn’t be a bin in the background, or a lamppost in the way, therefore I don’t need to use editing software to remove these things.

I love the challenge, and I do like to be a bit different, but I’m certainly not here to change the world. I love to talk about film photography, and I’m always happy to answer questions that people have about it. Being a wedding photographer that shoots only on film is certainly not an easy route to take, but I do it because I love it, hopefully that shows through in my pictures.

This isn’t a job to me, it’s a passion.

Why do I shoot film?