Beltane Fire

Festival on Calton Hill

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 for extras

Someone emailed to suggest I add a wee tips payment option - for those of you who don’t want to subscribe but would like to offer something as a “Cheers mate, enjoyed that” option. So here it is.

The May Queen leads her procession around the paths on Calton Hill above the city

Summer was welcomed in by a cast of over 300 participants in the Beltane Fire Festival last night, watched by nearly 9 thousand spectators on Calton Hill. The weather was kind this year but even in the most atrocious driving rain and chilly temperatures the troop known simply as The Reds wear the bare minimum.

The Reds wear mostly red paint which surely has warming properties

Beltane is a modern re-creation of the ancient Celtic ritual of welcoming Summer by lighting fires, beating drums and running around scantily clad clutching naked flames. It is crammed full of photogenic moments, but it does have its challenges.

The May Queen arrives on the National Monument at the start of the shenanigans

The most obvious challenge is the darkness. Flash photography is discouraged by the organisers but even if it wasn’t, flash would destroy the authenticity of the scenes and the atmosphere. Which brings me to the next challenge - bright pockets of flickering light - naked flames on poles, in urns on the ground, being carried, on burning sculptures and over a fiery archway. Your camera will have a hard job choosing the exposure, so you need to take control.

He looks pretty pleased with himself having climbed that fleshy pyramid

First you’ll need to dial in a high ISO - I was using between 12,000 and 56,000 most of the time last night. Yes, you’ll get noisy looking shots but unless the scene is a very static subject you’ll need to try and freeze movement with a shortish exposure. The stack of red humanity above was shot at 1/125 sec. Not fast enough to freeze all movement but there will at least be pockets of sharpness.

On a previous year I tried a bit of long exposure using a tripod as the procession walked through the frame. Taking a tripod to this event brings a whole new set of problems and I’ve not taken one since.

The Green Man and the May Queen are of course destined to be together but there’s a good bit of chasing around to be done before that can happen - so we have to chase around after them…along paths…up and down slopes…through arches…

The archway in 2023 was pretty funky

…but the main characters move pretty slowly and if you plan it well and study their movements, you can find moments where they are more or less still, allowing you to use a slower shutter speed - the one below of Alix the May Queen was 1/40 sec.

This years May Queen - Alix - was very gracious and would pause in position to allow for sharper images

The biggest problem is that the light is very patchy. If you are carrying a burning torch your face will be well lit, but many of the interesting characters didn’t carry their own light supply. You then have to look to see where they will pass some good light and plan your shots accordingly.

The best light of the evening was underneath the burning archway, so we waited for the Green Man to cross into the zone. Two further steps and his face was cast in shadow.

The funnest scenes are usually provided by The Reds but they are fast moving and random, so you will end up shooting lots of frames and throwing most of them in the digital bin. If you’re lucky you will catch the occasional gem.

I’ll finish trawling through my 1400 frames to see if there are a few more worth digging out and polishing. This last one is perhaps my favourite from the night - the sharpness of the sombre (and still) torch bearer compared with the frantic movement and ribaldry of the Reds.

Until next time dudes and dudettes.

(find out more about Beltane over here - beltane.org/about-beltane/)

Someone emailed to suggest I add a wee tips payment option - for those of you who don’t want to subscribe but would like to offer something as a “Cheers mate, enjoyed that” option. So here it is.