Fiona and Keith's wedding

Fiona and Keith were married Saturday at Cockpen Carrington church amid beautiful blue skies and lovely warm sunshine, despite the forecast being for rain all week. I’d originally met them at a wedding fair at Melville Castle several months ago and they booked their wedding photography the very next day. I’m exhibiting at Melville Castle’s wedding fair this Sunday so I hope to meet many more ’Fiona and Keith’s’ lol.

It was a great wedding and a fantastic day all round. I started half an hour before the ceremony at the church with Keith and the groomsmen and was booked through to their first dance. There had been a hiccup with the church during the week and the minister who was schedule to conduct the proceeding had to be changed at short notice. Although his replacement admitted to me prior to the ceremony of being rather nervous he did a great job and conducted a beautiful service.

Both Diane and myself shot from the upper balcony throughout the ceremony, one of us one either side of the church, and captured all the magical moments as we went through the declarations, the ring exchange, and the vows, etc. After the signing of the register I ran ahead of the newly weds and photographed them as they made their way back up the aisle and exited the church. After a few minutes of sharing congratulations with the guests we ran through their group photographs in the church grounds and then we were heading off to the Minto Hotel in Edinburgh for their wedding breakfast and reception.

The Minto has its own small private garden which we were allowed to use for photographs so I took Fiona and Keith out for a twenty minute session and then we brought all their family out for a couple of group shots in the garden too. The wedding breakfast was small and intimate with just sixteen family and close and friends. This meant I was able to get a shot of the whole room with everyone seated at their tables which were laid out horseshoe style. Likewise during the speeches, as well as the close ups of the speakers I grabbed a few wide angle shots of the whole room as the guests enjoyed the speeches. My favorite was the one shown here with the sun bursting the tiny gap in the window blinds.

The evening guests started arriving at half past seven and while Fiona and Keith and the bridal party greeted everyone on arrival we had previously arranged to set up and run a mini photo studio for twenty minutes giving guests opportunity to have some profession portraits taken if they wanted to before the dancing got underway. A couple of years ago I did some photography for the Minto Hotels website so I knew I wouldn’t need to bring a mobile background as one of the walls behind the dance floor would be ideal. This was the first wedding where we’ve ran the Portrait Booth and we were really pleased with how popular and what great fun it was and we are now offering it as an additional service to all our wedding clients who have booked us through their evening reception. There’s not many wedding photographers in Edinburgh, or even wedding photographers in Scotland for that matter, who offer a unique, bespoke service as this so its always exciting to be at the forefront. The advantage of a mini photo studio as opposed to a Photo Booth (which I believe are popular in the USA) is that I can quickly pose the couples and control the lighting to ensure the resulting images make high quality, beautiful portraits as you can see from the example here where I simply turned both girls forty five degrees to the camera, weight on their back leg which relaxes their upper body, and lighted them with a white shoot through umbrella and a soft box. We photographed about ten couples and six or seven groups inside the twenty minutes. For our next wedding we are booked for the entire evening so we’ll run the digital studio for a couple of hours after the first dance adjacent to the dance hall and we’ll also have on site instant mounting and printing so guests can take away their portrait before the end of the night.

While Keith and Fiona’s evening guests were arriving their cake was brought in and set up on the dance floor. When everyone was ready Keith and his bestman officially welcomed everybody and then we had the cake cutting ceremony. As is often the case at weddings I was called upon to give the instructions as Keith and Fiona weren’t too sure what they had to do. So we set them up and had the lights brought down low and got a nice set of atmospheric photos as they cut into the beautiful cake and then went straight into the first dance.