Sarah | Northern California

Most of the time, you will see Molly and I out in the wild wilderness somewhere, capturing a couple on their elopement or adventure session. We rarely do in-home sessions. Which is why we had to reach out to a friend of ours and set up this cool little in-home shoot. Typically when you see an in-home shoot, you will see a beautiful house with perfectly styled furniture and accessories. Usually the house is perfectly lit, with huge windows and doorways letting in all kinds of light. And also you will usually see the shoot happening at the absolutely best time of the day (which is super smart, and usually the way I would schedule a shoot). But… how often do we get to plan around all of that? How often does the house look completely spotless and styled to perfection? I know my house never looks like that haha!

That is where this idea came from. We decided to use a normal house with normal windows and doors, and at a horrible time of the day for lighting. I figured, if we wanted to stretch our capabilities and practice shooting in environments that are not optimal, we should completely wing it and do zero pre-planning. The only thing we planned, was Sarah’s outfit (which Molly purchased off of Amazon for $60). We wanted something basic to contrast the environment, which is why you will see Sarah wearing tan against the darker backgrounds and black against the lighter backgrounds. Other than that we showed up at the house with 20 minutes to spare. I scouted the sections we would shoot in for light, and then waited for Sarah to finish her hair. This actually pushed us past sunlight hitting the house (due to her hair taking just a bit longer than expected), and we ended up shooting in even less than optimal lighting than we originally expected. This was all fantastic though! I loved the challenge.

Right away we started to shoot indoors near the windows and doors to allow for the little bit of light left to hit Sarah. This gave me just enough light to get an exposure of 1/30th at f/2.0, so I shot it! I was worried that shooting at f/2.0 within such a tight space, and in darker light, that I might miss focus more often than I would’ve liked (which is more than zero frames haha). Surprisingly, though, out of several rolls of film I think I only missed focus once! In the end, after we got our scans back from the lab, we loved them! I’m usually really drawn to the light, bright, and sun kissed outdoor sessions, but this indoors session just stole my heart. From then on out I was hooked, and hoped that more of my clients and brides would have more moody indoor spaces for me to shoot in.

Fuji 400H and Ilford Delta 3200 film