Journal.Nostalgia, before it happens.

Arnie found me on Instagram after spending what I can only assume was a significant amount of time looking at lake photographs. He wanted to propose at Lake Pukaki before the tourists arrived. That meant 4:45am, a two-hour drive from Queenstown in the dark, standing on the shore of one of the coldest bodies of water I've ever been near.

I shot on a mix of digital and 35mm Kodak Portra 400 — the latitude in the film handles the compressed tonal range of pre-dawn better than anything I can achieve in post. She said yes before he finished the sentence. He cried first. I kept shooting.

Jervis Bay has some of the whitest sand in the world — a geological fact that becomes a photographic gift in the hour before sunset. The light bounces and wraps and you get this extraordinary fill that makes harsh shadows impossible.

Lorena and Jackson. He'd planned this for four months. The one variable he couldn't control was the weather. We got lucky. Cloud cover broke at 4pm and by 5 the sky was exactly what it needed to be.

I started shooting weddings digitally like everyone else. Thousands of frames per day, a safety net of redundancy. Then I started bringing one roll of Kodak Portra 800 to each wedding — not as a gimmick, but to see what happened when I had to choose.

What happened was that I became more present. When you know you have 36 frames, you wait. You watch. You feel the rhythm of the day differently. The film frames from those weddings are consistently the images clients print large and put on their walls.

The grain isn't noise. It's evidence that something real happened in front of a camera.

Tegan and Tom got married in a garden in Canberra. Not a venue — a garden. Their garden. The kind of wedding where the celebrant is an old friend and the dancing starts before the speeches end and someone's dog wanders through the ceremony and nobody minds.

These are the weddings I love most. No timeline pressure, no venue coordinator, no grand hall that needs to be vacated by 11pm. Just people, in a place they love, celebrating something real.