Apex International Wedding. My last wedding of 2017, which took place on the 29th was a wedding of real mixed emotions. I’ve photographed dozens and dozens of weddings at Lothian Chambers and Andrew and Mari, who I’ll talk about in a moment, managed to bag the second to last ever wedding at this fabulous venue.
Lothian Chambers had hosted weddings for the last 9 or 10 ten years and I must have photographed in the region of 60/70 weddings there. I understand the council want to cut costs and it’s believe cutting loose Lothian Chambers will save them £150k in operating costs but how much money are they losing from not hosting weddings? So I arrived at Lothian Chambers really early, more again below on this, and saw the new French(y) stuff installed. It was also really interested as I got to have a full walk around the building and see what all the spaces looked like and almost eerily what they looked like empty.
Also apparently the council haven’t really announced to the public that Lothian Chambers has been sold so when I was waiting at the venue at least half a dozen people came in to ask about registering a death and were to told to go to City Chambers. Edinburgh Council in a brief summary, if it doesn’t glorify themselves they don’t give a shit. Take the roads in Edinburgh, absolutely horrific but instead of spending money on reparing the roads they’ve spent £80,000 for a lighting display on the mound which will apparently relieve stress. Fix the roads, ease congestion, that will alleviate stress, not a stupid light display. And don’t even get me started about the trams!
But rant over, Mari is Japanese Brazilian but lives in Germany while Andrew lives in Brazil and is from Scotland, hence coming here to get married. The wedding was a really international event and interestingly they asked for a second shooter, so Liv assisted me. In fact a lot of the photos below were taken by Liv including virtually all of the preparation shots.
So this left me in an interesting situation. Mari got prepared at the Apex International in the Grassmarket area and only wanted Liv to do the preparation shots so we caught a taxi into town then I went to Lothian Chambers and this is when I got a chance to have a good chat about the changes and also to take some photos.
Being the penultimate wedding at Lothian Barbara, who is one of the most awesome registrars in Edinburgh, hosted the wedding and it ran fairly late due to some technical issues (nothing to do with me!) but the ceremony was fairly short and sweet. Sadly because the wedding did over-run it’s timeslot and also with the changes that have already been made to the building, we were unable to take any photos in the upper floor at all but these were made up with the photos we took outside.
Funniest moment of the day was the piper at the zebra crossing which you can see way below. Unfortunately many drivers in Edinburgh are ignorant prats and Andrew and Mari wanted to walk from Lothian Chambers to the Grassmarket (which is a great route for photos btw), and when we got to the zebra crossing low-and-behold aforementioned ignorant prat was parked on the crossing. So the piper walked to literally a couple inches of the car so the driver had to back up.
The Apex International was also fun to photograph. Every single wedding or wedding reception at the Apex demands taking photos on the terrace that looks out towards the castle and on the day we had quite a lot of snow (by Edinburgh city centre standards) so I took photos that I really like.
And that’s it for this Apex International Wedding. We were there for a total around 9 hours. The wedding absolutely flew by but was a lot of fun to photograph. Andrew and Mari were great to work with and it was great to have an assistant for once. More weddings to come…
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