Polaroid Wedding Photography

In today's world, where everything is digital, holding a physical photograph in your hand and witnessing an image come to life is a magical experience. Polaroid photography is truly a form of chemical magic. If you've ever shot with a Polaroid camera, you know what I mean. We aim to bring that same magic to your wedding day, with a huge variety of cameras and films.

The Delight of Instant Film

At weddings, kids often ask to see the photos we've taken, and it's always a bit of a letdown to have to say "sorry, we can't show you yet." This is one of the key differences between shooting film and digital - with film, you can't see what you've got until the roll is developed. But Polaroid is different. It's still film, but it allows us to see a photo come to life right before our eyes. Polaroid is unique in that it's the only film on the market that offers this instant gratification. It's the reason Ansel Adams used black and white Polaroids to compose shots before setting up his large format cameras. He even used a Polaroid SX-70, the same kind of camera we use for our Polaroid wedding photography.

Instant Gratification on Display

One of the things we love about Polaroid wedding photography is the ability to share physical photos on the same day. It's an experience you wouldn't expect with film photography. One of my favorite moments as a Polaroid wedding photographer is handing a huge stack of Polaroids to the couple at the reception dinner. As they carefully look through the photos, their eyes light up, tears well up, and they begin passing the Polaroids around to their nearest and dearest. This creates a chain reaction of smiles and happy memories. Grandparents are especially delighted to see that people are still using Polaroids, let alone taking Polaroid wedding photos.

super 8 video couples looking at polaroids

Our Journey to Polaroid

We both fell in love with film photography at the same time we fell in love with each other. When we first met at a film photography meet-up, Alex had already been shooting film for a couple of years while I had just purchased a Fujifilm Instax Wide a few months prior. I was initially intimidated by 35mm film and chose instant film as it felt approachable and hard to mess up. Interestingly, we have photos of each other that we took on the first day we met on film, and now we're married! Our love for Polaroid and film has been a significant part of our relationship.

Fast forward one month, and the COVID pandemic hit while we were visiting friends in Joshua Tree. So naturally, we canceled our flight, and rented a one-way car from California to our home in Asheville, NC. It was my first time exploring the South West so we looped in a couple of detours along the way. Throughout our five-day road trip, we saw Death Valley National Park, a deserted Las Vegas, and Ouray, Colorado. The trip took about 5 days and I documented it all on a Fujifilm Instax Wide (see photos below).

From that point on, I began to photograph all of our adventures on instant film. I have bundles of photo albums filled to the brim with our adventures, with scribbles of dates and locations on the back. These photos have become some of my most cherished items.

Our Start to Polaroid Wedding Photography

I was hooked on instant film after that first road trip. So naturally, I wanted to bring the same joy and excitement I felt about instant film to all of the couples I photographed. Alex and I began working together for weddings almost as soon as we met. He would bring me along to his jobs, and I would come along to his. From that moment onward, if I was photographing a wedding it only felt natural to bring along my instant film camera to capture other people's special moments.

So in 2020, for every wedding that decided to proceed (safely), we were taking Polaroids alongside our digital photography. In the beginning, I started with my Instax Wide. It was good and reliable, but it wasn’t true Polaroid and I wanted that classic square white frame. I finally bit the bullet and got my first Polaroid camera, an SX-70 Sonar. It was my favorite camera I’ve ever owned and it came with me everywhere I went. The auto-focus on that camera was amazing, and my images always came out tack sharp.

But there was a learning curve when I transitioned between Instax wide and Polaroid. The two film types react so differently to light, and it was a bit of an adjustment to learn the different quirks of Polaroid. Now, years later, I’ve noticed that the biggest difference between the two is that Polaroid has a slight advantage in dynamic range and retains more shadows than Instax. Polaroid also isn’t as “punchy” in contrast and has a smoother gradient between the highlights and shadows. For that reason, I prefer to shoot Polaroid over Instax in daylight. But Instax really shines when shot with a flash. I want that kind of punchy, contrast look, and the cooler tones of the film balance out warm ambient light in a beautiful way.

So even though I began to shoot Polaroid back in 2020, we hadn't fully transitioned to shooting exclusively on film. We were still finding our rhythm and figuring out how to work together. But one thing that felt right from the start was Polaroid wedding photos. It was easy to access Polaroid film, and when we began, we included Polaroid wedding photos for free because juggling two digital cameras and a Polaroid camera simultaneously was something we were still learning.

Now that I’ve photographed countless weddings on Polaroid, we started including it in our film photography packages. We shoot countless packs of Polaroid for every wedding we photograph, and it’s still a joy to pick up my SX-70 and share my love for the format with all of our couples.

polaroid wedding photographer candid — this paparazzi photo of us is courtesy of one of our lovely couples

Transitioning From Digital to Film

Our origins as photographers started with digital cameras, as you naturally do. Digital photography was, and still is, the expected industry standard for wedding photography. But as our love for film continued to grow, so did our idea to create Superlove. We wanted to break industry standards and create something totally different that we had never seen before. Our dream to create Superlove started in 2021, a year after we started to shoot more and more film. Alex coined the name Superlove as we were walking back to our car from a rock climb out at our favorite crag in Rumbling Bald. It was perfect, but totally rebranding two companies and merging them together was a huge feat and it took us years to finally get to this point of actually launching Superlove.

But it just always felt right to shoot film for other people.

We’ve heard from so many couples about their connection with film. We’ve heard stories about how their grandparent’s took all of their home movies on Super 8 and they grew up watching them, and about how families will flip through their old wedding albums or 4x6 prints of family vacations. Or maybe they photograph film themselves and document their own lives and adventures with this format the same way that Alex and I do. Or maybe they simply just love the look and feeling of film, and nostalgic and timeless it feels compared to digital photography.

Film was the only way people could document their own lives back then, and their photos are still timeless now. It’s that love for film that couples come to us to document their weddings on Polaroid, 35mm, medium-format, and Super 8.

So here we are, in the winter of 2023, launching Superlove to bring Polaroid wedding photography to couples all around the world.

Behind the Scenes: Shooting Polaroids on a Wedding Day

As with all our photography work, we aim to seek a balance between intentionally composed images and candid, in-the-moment photos. But with Polaroid, my goal is to create a mini photo album of the day completely on instant film. So if you were to flip through just your Polaroids, it would feel like you got a sense of your entire wedding day, just from those images. I view it as a creative challenge and exercise to figure out how I can encapsulate an entire wedding day in 100 images or less from just Polaroid photos alone.

Doing this also helps me keep track of the images I’ve taken on 35mm film and Super 8. Not being able to preview the photos taken on any of my other cameras poses is another key difference between digital and analog documentation, but having Polaroid images to reference is like a little reminder of the photos I did take. Polaroid wedding photos are just as helpful to us as they are memorable and cherished as they are to our clients.

Intentional Poses

Intentionally posed and composed images of couples are some of our favorites to photograph. When a couple can hand over their full trust to our creative vision, we’re giddy and use up every second we can to create something truly unique and different. Oftentimes, we’ll document the same pose/moment across all of the different film formats we have from Polaroid to 35mm to medium format and sometimes Super 8.

Spontaneous and Candid Moments

Candid moments are captured on the fly without much planning, which can be challenging when a pack of Polaroid film only holds eight images. The crucial aspect of a good candid Polaroid is timing when needing to change out a pack of film. I've had moments of quickly taking a photo, only to miss the moment because I didn't have enough film in my camera. After three years of trial and error, I've had to learn to meticulously keep count of how many shots I have left.

My favorite thing with candid Polaroid wedding photos is showing the person I photographed the Polaroid I took of them minutes after it was taken. Seeing their face light up makes my job that much more fun. Oftentimes, they'll take a photo of the Polaroid on their iPhone to share with everyone else. I love incorporating a couple's guests into the Polaroid wedding photography experience.

Same-Day Sneak Peeks

Throughout the wedding day, I love to show off a Polaroid or two of what we're capturing. It loops couples into our creative process and gives them an idea of what we're documenting. If we were shooting digital photos, it would be the analog equivalent of showing a couple the back of the camera. The grand Polaroid reveal, though, happens near the end of the night, usually around dinnertime. During a lull in the flurry of activity, the couple and their closest people tend to gather around. That's when I pop out of nowhere and hand you a fat stack of 'roids, as I like to say. Then the couple and their people spread all the photos out on the table, taking a look at everyone, sometimes snapping photos with their phones of their favorites. This sneak peek experience is the first look they’ll have of their wedding photos, and we hope it makes every couple even more excited to see the final gallery of images.