In the middle of February I photographed my second Kippilaw House wedding of the year. In the blog post I recently wrote about Angela and Jonny’s wedding I raved about the venue and I still think it’s an absolutely fantastic venue but Will and Rebecca’s wedding was equally as awesome as previous weddings there but as each wedding does, it had a different feel to it.

Both Will and Rebecca were really great to work with and all of the guests I spoke to were really nice. I loved the whole atmosphere of the wedding and especially so in the evening with all the sing-a-longs and impromptu performances. The wedding also took place in the front room of the house, just as it did with the first wedding I photographed at Kippilaw House, and it’s definitely different to getting married on the stairs.

There were a few real highlights for me on the day. The first again were the impromptu performances. One gentleman played guitar and sang during the ceremony which I thought was fantastic but he also performed again in the evening. I thought he was fantastic and it really added to the day. Another was Will’s best man holds drum workshops and he performed in the evening. Again this was absolutely brilliant and really added to the whole day.

The last thing, and this might seem a bit strange, was Will’s kilt. I have very distant Scottish roots and have never worn a kilt before, even though Liv is trying to push me to wear one, but for me most kilts look very similar. For me to wear one it has to be something a bit different, something maybe a bit more extravagant(?). Anyway, in Edinburgh there is a company called 21st Century Kilts which I have seen on the internet and their kilts are worn by celebrities including Lenny Kravitz, Vin Diesel, Alan Cummings and more. Will have a kilt tailored for him by 21st Century Kilts and it looked awesome. Maybe next time before I go to Taiwan I’ll have a kilt made for myself and wear it over there. It will be interesting to see what looks I get off the locals.

So that’s really it for this blog post. Great couple, fantastic venue, great details, great atmosphere. Another truly exceptional wedding at Kippilaw House (still one of my very favourite wedding venues ever).

We’ve had an absolutely miserable winter here in Edinburgh. It’s one of the worst I can remember and as I’m writing this blog post it’s nearly April and just yesterday (28th March) it was snowing. It’s been really challenging as in previous winters I’ve either worked full time or at least part time in office jobs but now I’m doing photography full time I’m out in all kinds of weather conditions several times (at least) per week.

So it was an absolute joy when I photographed Sue and Julian’s wedding at the beginning of March in some of the nicest weather we’ve had this year so far. Sure it was a little cold but the sun was warm and for this time of the year you couldn’t ask for better weather.

Sue and Julian booked me in the autumn and live near Gloucester, an area I know extremely well. I lived in Herefordshire/Gloucestershire from the age of around 8 until I was 19 so I know both counties very well and in many ways still miss living down there.

Back to the wedding, it was a small affair with just Sue and Julian with myself and Liv acting as witnesses. Liv only stayed until just after the ceremony but following the ceremony I took Sue and Julian to a few different locations around Edinburgh’s Old Town and then we headed down to Prestonfield House to take some photos inside and main.

Both Sue and Julian were a real delight to work with. Julian was a little nervous in front of the camera but after a few shots he relaxed. Sue looked really beautiful and I really couldn’t have asked for a nicer couple to work with.

Towards the end of December, and this is the last December wedding I’ll be adding to this blog, I photographed a wedding for Kirsty and Jamie, who you may remember I photographed a pre wedding shoot for in the autumn, at Limekilns Church in Fife.

Church weddings are always really interesting. Churches have the most fantastic architectural features but nine times out of ten the lighting is absolutely horrendous. Limekilns Church was no exception, the lighting inside was pretty awful but the church had a lot of space for me to move around and some really great angles for taking photographs.

The day started off at Kirsty’s family farm with a few pre wedding photos. I stayed at the house for maybe 30 minutes or so then headed over to Limekilns Church where I met up with Jamie, had a chat with the minister (who was absolutely great, really nice guy) and also met the ushers and other guests.

Most of the photos inside the church were taken in front of the foyer at the back of the church but I took the group shots from the balcony which offered absolutely perfect angles for group wedding photography. Following the photos at Limekilns Church everyone jumped in their cars and headed off to one of my favourite wedding venues; Houston House in Uphall. I’ve photographed three weddings/receptions at Houston House and it’s a fantastic venue. The grounds, especially in the summer are quite beautiful, the venue is easy to access and the staff, at least the one’s I’ve dealt with, have all been extremely friendly.

All in all it was a really great wedding. Kirsty and Jamie were really easy to work with, I really enjoyed all of the venues and the whole day passed quickly and smoothly. Perfect!

It’s absolutely amazing how time flies but just a few days ago my daughter Amelia celebrated her first birthday. Her FIRST BIRTHDAY! We’ve been asking ourselves over the last few days “where has the time gone?”. For us it literally feels just like a couple months since she was a newborn baby and I remember absolutely everything that happened during Liv’s pregnancy. Her labour is still really vivid, I remember everything that happened and exactly what time.

So how was my first year as a parent? Amazing, tiring, exhausting, exciting, exhilerating, busy, stressful, joyful and many other things. Just a couple years ago I was working part time as well as doing the photography almost full time and I thought I was busy then but since Amelia was born my business has really boomed and I’m really incredibly busy nowadays.

If I’m not on a photoshoot I’m usually looking after Amelia which leaves me very little time to editing and virtually no time to do anything personal like play xbox/go the gym/etc but becoming a parent has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Since I wrote my last blog post about Amelia she has changed beyond recognition. The last time I wrote about her she had just started eating solid food and interacting with us more but she’s walking, she has five teeth at the time of writing this post and she’s almost ready to talk. She’s still an incredibly happy little girl and she’s also really strong.

So that’s all I can really think to write about her for the moment. She’s growing rapidly, she’s absolutely hilarious and also really generous. She’s always trying to feed us and always gives us her toys when she’s playing them.

Incidentally for her birthday we took her to Doodles once again to have impressions made of her hands and feet. We had intended to do this again at three months old but she hadn’t really grown an awful lot since she was born so we decided to wait until she was one. We’re super excited about seeing the new impressions. We also took her to her favourite creche Gambardo’s in Fountain Park. We have certain issues with Gambardo (lack of staff, trashy parents who let their older children run around the toddler playpen knocking babies over) but Amelia absolutely loves it there. We finally ended up at Nando’s simply because it’s next door to Gambardo’s and it’s cheap.

Just a few days after her birthday we all moved home. We had lived in the Meadowbank area of Edinburgh for nearly four years but in that time the area has become extremely run down and we were simply appalled by some of the people in the area. For example our downstairs neighbours would complain about us if we washed our clothes at 11am but it was ok for them to smoke drugs all fight/slam doors at all hours (including 2-3am). We also saw a number of young parents in the area walking their babies around while smoking drugs. Classy!

Because of moving home we delayed her real birthday party and on the 17th, as a big thank you to friends that have helped us out not just with the house move but also with Amelia, we booked a joint birthday/thank you party at one of our favourite restaurants; Vittoria. Suffice to say everyone had great fun, including Amelia.

So below are some new photos of her that I haven’t blogged before. The first photo of her wearing an elf outfit was taken on Christmas Day. The next three photos were taken when she was around 7-8 months and the rest were taken within the last couple of months and the last few photos of her in the creche and where she’s having her hands and feet cast again were taken on her birthday.

At the beginning of December I photographed a wedding at the Apex International Hotel in Grassmarket for Suki and Scott. I last photographed a wedding there around 14 months prior and it’s a really interesting hotel. The first wedding I did there it was absolutely roasting hot inside, seriously seriously hot but this time it was much better and everything about the day was an absolute pleasure.

I didn’t spend an awful lot of time with Scott on the day as my main focus at the beginning of the day was the bridal preparations but Scott and especially Suki were really great to work with. Suki for all the time I spent with her was absolutely lovely and her family and friends were all immensely pleasant. The ceremony itself was held in the Heights Restaurant which has the most stunning views of Edinburgh Castle and Grassmarket. The ceremony itself was really nice although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the registrar who seemed like she couldn’t get out of there quick enough.

Following the ceremony Suki and Scott hosted a Chinese tea ceremony for their relatives which was really nice. This was the second tea ceremony, within a wedding setting, that I had witnessed and I really like this tradition.

On the day we didn’t get a chance to take a large group photo of everyone or any photos in front of the hotel. With the wedding being held in December and time being imperative, the plan was to photograph the ceremony, take some photos on the balcony, take a few group photos then head into Old Town and take some couple photos. Unbeknown to both Suki and Scott, Suki’s father had arranged for a Chinese dragon dance which by the time this had finished the daylight had begun to fade. We literally had about 15 minutes of daylight left and thankfully we managed to get some photos captured in Old Town.

Another thing I loved about this wedding were the details. Suki made literally hundreds of paper cranes which were hung up around the hall where they had the dancing in the evening. This was a really nice touch. Another great detail was the wedding cake. So many wedding cakes at so many weddings are really plain but one of Scott’s work colleagues created this cake for them and it was the first wedding cake I’ve seen in a while that really wowed me. I absolutely love watching the tv shows Ace of Cakes and the Choccywoccydoodah show and their cake remind me of cakes from these shows.

In recent blog posts I’ve been saying I’ll be writing shorter blog posts in the future but just recently, in fact twice, I returned to possibly my all time favourite wedding venue. About 18 months ago I photographed a wedding at Kippilaw House in Melrose, which resides in the Scottish Borders (really beautiful part of the country), for Kelly and Niall so I was extremely delighted when I booked not one but two weddings in the space of a month there.

Kippilaw House for me is an absolutely perfect wedding venue. At most wedding venues you feel like, or at least I do, you’re part of a manufacturing line. You stay in the hotel the night before, you get married the following day, everything goes by a schedule and you’re shipped out the following day and you have to pay a lot of money for not a lot of time.

I won’t mention names of venues here but many venues in Edinburgh cost in excess of £6000-7000 just to walk in the door to get married while at Kippilaw House you pay considerably less than this but you can hire the house for a whole week. Let’s put it this way, if you fill out the whole house which has 13/14 bedrooms, fill these out and it will cost on average £100 a head to stay there for a week. Outstanding!

Certainly the wedding couples I’ve worked with at Kippilaw House really understand why somewhere like Kippilaw House is so great. You arrive a few days early, have lots of parties and on the day everyone is so relaxed and it really shows.

But back to this wedding, I was hired by Jonny and Angela to photograph their wedding just a few days into January. Angela I believe works in design while Jonny is a chef and owns a restaurant in Musselburgh, Edinburgh. Of course with Jonny being a chef food was a big part of the day and one of the reasons they booked Kippilaw House (Kippilaw House has an absolutely fantastic kitchen) and the theme behind the meal was inspired. Every table was named after a chef and each table had a large carvery chicken. One person from each table would wear an apron saying that particular chef attended the wedding and I thought this was great.

Everything about the day was really fantastic. Angela and Jonny despite being a bit camera shy (at least in Angela’s case) were really easy to work with and really super nice people. Angela looked absolutely beautiful in her wedding dress and was a joy to photograph and the whole day while long (I was out for about 14 hours on their wedding day) it really didn’t seem that long.

This post as you can see contains a fairly huge amount of images but I really wanted to share with you many more than I have included. At the time of writing this post I’ve just started editing another wedding I photographed at Kippilaw House this past Saturday and I’m also really excited about sharing that wedding which I will do in a couple weeks time. This new wedding had a completely different feel to it compared to Angela and Jonny’s wedding but was equally fantastic.

Hope you like the images below.

This is going to be a really quick blog post as I’m in the process of editing three weddings at once, trying to do several album layouts and I’ve got a load of commercial work going.

Around 18 months ago I was asked to take some group photos for the Stockbridge Pipe Band. I don’t really do a lot of these dedicated group shots nowadays but the pipe major Euan and the various members of his pipe band that I have talked to are really great guys and gals and it was a pleasure to work with them all again. It was also really great to see my good fiend Michael who is also a member of this pipe band and to arrange a date to catch up.

We took the group photo at a primary school in Stockbridge itself and while the room itself is spacious it needed an awful lot of photoshopping to get rid of radiators, windows etc.

As mentioned I’m really busy at the moment with lots of work, lots of editing but also busy moving house and spending time with my daughter. Liv is also under a lot of pressure with work and she usually works 2 evenings a week and one day at the weekend, so we’re busy. Liv will also need to go for an operation in the near future and it’s Amelia’s first birthday really soon so we’ll likely have a big day out going to here favourite creche, we’ll definitely go back to Doodles to have more impressions made of her hands and feet and we’ll have a party in the evening.

Busy exciting fun stressful times. Hope you like the photos below.

Literally just a couple days before the end of 2012 I photographed a full day wedding at two completely new and one old location in Edinburgh. Daniela and Andrew, who live in Australia (Daniela is German, Andrew is Scottish) booked me many months before and although the reception venue completely changed all three venues were a delight to photograph.

The day started off with preparation photos at the Fraser Suites, where I had photographed Rachel and Graeme’s wedding just a couple months before and both time I’ve been to this venue I’ve been impressed. Daniella booked the Princess Suite which has really beautiful views of the city and for myself was a pleasure to work in with it’s big windows and lots of light coming in. Most venues in Edinburgh tend to be quite dark so this was really nice.

Following the preparation shots I headed down to Duddingston Kirk, one of the two new venues, which was a really interesting venue. From a photographers point of view working on the ground level during a wedding is nearly impossible but there’s a vestry which overlooks the interior of the church from which I worked from. This gave me really great angles of the church and I really enjoyed taking photos in here.

Following the ceremony and the obligatory group and ambient photos outside we headed off the to the reception. As mentioned the reception venue was to be elsewhere and there’s no point in naming this venue but City Chambers is a fantastic venue to work in. Just like many venues in Edinburgh it’s really dark but architecturally inside the building is really beautiful.

Below are some of my favourite photos from this wedding. I’ve still got a few weddings to post from December on this blog which I’m really excited about sharing including a wedding at the awesome Kippilaw House, a Lothian Chambers wedding and also a wedding held in Limekilns with the reception at Houston House.

Back in October I photographed a wedding at Edinburgh Castle for Suzy and Kevin. Suzy is from Ireland and Kevin is Scottish but they live in Canada and decided to come back to Edinburgh to get married. You probably read the first line saying they got married in October but such is my life now it’s taken four months to update this blog with the photos from this wedding.

The day started off with a really brief session of preparation shots from which I then headed up to Edinburgh castle. The wedding was held in St Margaret’s Chapel right at the top of the castle and the ceremony was due to take place at 1.30 but as agreed I arrived there really early and for the first time I was able to see the 1 o’clock gun fire.

The ceremony itself was fairly short but really great. The minister was really funny and despite the numerous tourists that hung around the chapel during the ceremony it was a really great wedding. Following the ceremony we took some group shots on the lawn outside and following this Suzy, Kevin and myself headed into Old Town to take some more personal photos in some of my favourite people places. After this we went back to the castle where I took some more group photos and some ambient photos in the Great Hall.

Once everyone had sat down I then disappeared for a few hours and rejoined the wedding party for their evening reception which was held at Howies on Waterloo Place. Both Liv and I have yet to eat at a Howies restaurant but each time we’ve been past the food smells really excellent, so one day we’re determined to give them a go.

So that’s it for this wedding, it was a pretty short day for myself but Suzy and Kevin were really great to work with and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole day. Below is a really small selection of my favourite photos from the day.

I thought I’d start off my wedding blogging for the year with a recent wedding I photographed at Prestonfield House Hotel. Wedding photography is a funny business, I’ll suddenly get booked up for multiple jobs at the same venue and the next year I won’t see it at all.

Prestonfield is a good example of this. In 2011 I did a few jobs at Prestonfield, which incidentally is still one of my very favourite venues in the Edinburgh area, but 2012 I think I maybe visited their once or twice (max). So just before Christmas I was contacted by Shona and Neil at fairly short notice to photograph their wedding at Prestonfield.

This was absolutely great as nothing against Lothian Chambers, but for the last couple of years at least I’ve started my wedding photography for the year at Lothian Chambers.

So this wedding at Prestonfield House was quite a short booking, just four hours but it absolutely flew by and both Shona and Neil were really easy to work with. I arrived a short time before the ceremony, photographed the ceremony in the Garden Room then we headed outside to take some group photos. With the wedding being in January it was absolutely freezing outside so we limited the group shots and then took some photos in the gardens. Following this my job was to really capture ambient photos which I really enjoyed. I stayed up until everyone sat down for the meal and I have to say the Garden Room looked absolutely stunning for both the wedding and the reception.

All in all it was a really great wedding. Shona and Neil as mentioned were really easy to work with and Shona looked beautiful in her dress. Just can’t wait to photograph my next wedding at Prestonfield!