My wife and I have gotten some interest in shooting film for weddings. We always bring a film camera with us to get a few pictures but this past summer we did a wedding almost entirely with film using a Canon Elan. It went great, photos came back even better than we expected. One day we'd love to do it with medium format.
My concern, however, is that the cameras we have are all used. We've tested them on our own to make sure they work but couldn't they fail at any time? Just recently my Nikon F2 came back from a CLA and the shutter was dragging on certain speeds, only exposing half a frame.
WARNING- RANT FOLLOWS
Several people on this thread have made comments about how older equipment may be less reliable. I disagree. 7 years ago, I purchased a new, top of the line canon digital camera for my wife as a christmas gift. At the time we lived in Maine, and we had a tradition of taking a walk in the woods, in snowshoes on New Years day. We went on our walk, and she carried her new camera, I brought a Cannonet QL17 rangefinder. I shot 2 rolls of film during our walk, and her camera stopped working half way through the walk. Certain that the week old camera would be under warranty, we brought it back to the camera store where I bought it, and they returned it to Canon for service. We were told that the camera was not servicable, that it had been abused (by operating it at extreem low temperatures), and due to the abuse, the warranty was not valid. Canon stated that no camera could be expected to operate properly under those conditions, despite the nice photographs that I showed them, taken with a 40 year old canon camera on that same walk.
If we compare our society today to what it was 50 years ago, we have moved from having a minority of women employed to having the majority of women employed, we have computers which have massively increased our productivity, yet for most of us, there is little change in our standard of living. I believe that in large part this is because so much of what we are using that productivity for is to produce disposable items. The cameras which are being produced today - even the high end cameras - are not being designed to have a working life of 10 years or more. Most of the cameras that I use were designed and built to operate more or less indefinitely. Last month I had a niece who got married, and I wanted to take some photographs at the wedding - I brought a MF camera (Hasselblad 503CX) and before the wedding I sent the camera and two lenses in for CLA (David Odess does a great job) My equipment operated flawlessly, despite being the same age as the bride, I believe that the prints that I produced will outlast the images that the professional photographer who did the wedding produced.
When photographing a wedding, you are creating images that will remain with the bride and groom for decades, I believe that the only responsible way to do this is with film, using a camera with which you are comfortable (shoot a lot), and film which you know.
) weddings require a high degree of professionalism and confidence in knowledge and application of equipment and always having a backup handy. Looking back at my long film use in photographing a variety of ceremonies, I would never do that again (film) given the speed, readiness and reliability of digital that we have today. Film is my chosen personal medium for landscape, scenic and other personal use. But anything formal is done to benefit everybody else who is more accustomed to digital and likes to see the results shared around. A file or files can always be written to film at some time if desired.
