This is my photography newsletter with fresh weekly photo stories of Edinburgh and beyond that you can get direct by email if you subscribe - free if you choose or pay a wee bit to give me a regular pat on the back.
One of you suggested I add a wee tips payment option - for when you don’t want, or can’t afford to subscribe but would like to offer something as a “Cheers mate, enjoyed that” gesture. So here is a link to do just that.
I’ve a fair bit of catching up to do from a busy August so please forgive the lack of freshness of the content of this edition but I think you’ll like to see these images, especially if you couldn’t attend.
This year’s Where to Begin event for the Edinburgh International Festival was a feast of visual delights - it was so good I went twice. There were flames aplenty and lots of interesting scenes with actors, distillation paraphernalia, and sorcery. It made for a very relaxing and stimulating preamble to the main event.
My first visit I got fixated with trying to get a good shot of the actors climbing ladders and using a long lens to bring them together with Edinburgh Castle behind.
This was complicated because the actors only went up for a wee while and with long gaps between. Also the castle lights kept changing because the Edinburgh Military Tattoo was running, which had no connection with this event at all. So I burned too much time before the main event when projections began on the north wall of the beautifully gothic Heriots building.
The display featured drone video footage of the city - moving images are hard to capture in a photo, so I had to ramp up the ISO of these shots to about 25,600 which makes for quite “noisy” shots, but I prefer sharp(ish) and noisy to streaky blurs.
The projection then moved on to explore an imagined mythical world underneath our city and the scenes became graphical and other-worldly. The music really complimented the visuals with most of it composed by Roma Yagnic. There was a beautiful section featuring Karine Polwart which was commissioned especially for this Where to Begin event, with lyrics by Davey Anderson and Simon Sharkey - it can be heard here.
The Festival Chorus provided their voices too and appeared at the end of the projection as the building behind them was dramatically lit. The low clouds helped create a very immersive experience.
I used 2 cameras for this shoot, with my Nikon D850 having a 70-200mm lens attached for most of the time and the wider shots were taken using my Nikon Z6 with a 14-30mm lens. For the shots centred with the projections on the building I held the camera over my head and peered up at the tilting LCD screen to check the camera was level and pointing the right way.
If I hadn’t done this most shots would have had someone’s arm in the way holding their phone. Apologies if you were behind me, but I did try and go as far back as possible, so there won’t have been many cursing me.
The event was sponsored by Macallan and was produced by Pinwheel in response to this year’s EIF Festival theme: Rituals That Unite Us. It was held over 3 evenings, timed perfectly for just after sunset and the setting in the grounds of George Heriot’s school in the middle of Edinburgh’s Old Town is hard to beat.
I’d love to see it all over again, as I now have tons more ideas for great shots, but I suppose I’ll have to wait for Pinwheel’s next event to explore.
Congratulations to the team at Edinburgh International Festival for pulling this one together. More please.