Today’s wedding was a really cool one. I love photographing weddings at new venues but it’s also great to go to venues I’ve been to many times before and so for this wedding the new venue was Newbattle Abbey and the old venue is the Apex Grassmarket hotel. According to Wikipedia, Newbattle Abbey was founded in 1140 and was originally a monks abbey. Over the years it has changed hands and during the 1600s the building was rebuilt and from 1937 it has been a college where you can study, amongst courses, arts, gaelic and rural studies. As well as the college they host conferences, events and of course weddings and what an incredible building to use!

It’s one thing seeing buildings on the internet but inside and out it’s absolutely stunning and totally perfect for weddings. On the day of the wedding, Lizzie and James started at the Apex International hotel in Grassmarket and all of the guests along with the groom and his friends jumped on the Red Wedding Bus (seriously, everyone should hire the bus, it’s really cool!) and headed over to Newbattle Abbey for the wedding ceremony. Sadly we didn’t have a lot of time there as we had intended to take photos in the gardens there but I did manage to get the drone up for some photos and then we took some photos in the Grassmarket area when we got back to Edinburgh.

Lizzie and James were really great to work with, very relaxed, a lot of fun and they did want some specific group photos but this worked out perfectly. Their wedding was quite a small one at about 50 people during the day but the bridesmaid and groomsman who helped me were great, they were really able to help me organise people. I’m good at shouting at wedding parties up to around 70 people (after that my voice gets a bit lost) but having help really does speed things up.

So back at the Apex, we managed to get some photos on the upper balcony and we had really awesome weather for this. Lizzie and James were an absolute pleasure to work with and I really enjoyed photographing their wedding.