Karin and Craig's San Francisco Wedding Photographs Taken with a Holga

    I've been enjoying shooting with my Holga camera, but find it almost unbearable to wait for the film to be developed.  Ariel and I got this roll of film professionally processed at the San Francisco Castro Photoworks, and of course, the anticipation was almost too much, and we ripped open the envelope barely before leaving the service counter.   
    Since Karin and Craig's wedding had a DIY spirit, with a Dia de Los Muertos celebratory theme, I thought that the Holga would be perfect to capture the occasion in a style that pushes beyond realist representation into a more pictorialist mode, and hopefully more ably communicating the whisper-like, evanescent moments of the wedding.  The Holga I use has a softening and uniquely distorting lens, with vignetting at the borders, that tends to produce a more expressionist-quality photograph.  Also, since each frame's negative is 120mm, great resolution is preserved in large-scale enlargements, just in case the newly-weds wanted a life-size portrait to hang on their wall! 
    It was such a joy to shoot at this wedding, located at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.  The bride looked beautiful in her vintage-inspired wedding dress, with the matching rose and lace bouquet made by her younger brother; the groom matched her style perfectly with a smart charcoal suit, and a playful marigold-orange and bone-white Dia de Los Muertos skull boutonniere.