Wedding photography at Dirleton Castle

I had the pleasure of photographing Jackie and Jaimie’s wedding, and their daughter Niamh’s naming ceremony, on 9 April at the Dirleton Castle in East Lothian, and afterwards at Craigielaw Golf Club.


I’d known Jackie for many years; her brother is a good friend of mine. So I was really pleased to be asked to shoot her wedding.

This was far from an easy shoot. It was an usually warm and sunny day, which is great for the bride and groom but for the photographer this usually means an extra few beads of sweat expelled in trying to find suitable light. The outdoor shots were often an exercise in finding shade.

Contrast issues

The most tricky area was the ceremony which took in the cellar of the castle. The harsh mid-day night flooded in through the window spaces but much of the action took place in shadow, giving me some nasty contrast issues. Obviously, if I’d had complete control over everything (which is of course never going to happen for a wedding photographer) I would have had king size bedsheets pinned up at the big window spaces, but without that, it takes a bit of extra work at the camera.


I had to spent a lot of time switching exposure modes between spot and Canon’s pattern mode, whilst as often as possible trying to keep the light in each shot consistent. I don’t mind shooting directly into the sun and it’s easy shooting your subject, facing the light, standing against a dark wall (expose for the face and let the background go dark).

The tricky bit is when bride and groom are facing each other with the sunlight at one of their backs. You get a wide contrast that makes your sensor strain to accommodate your incompetence as a photographer and one face lit, the other in shadow. Not great when you’re supposed to be capturing the happy couple’s sacred vows.

My solution, unsurprisingly, was to use bounce flash. Expose for the face lit by the direct sun and bounce the flash, in ETTL mode, so that it lights up the subject’s face standing opposite. This allowed me to get the type of shot below which I think really does justice to the bride at one of the key points of her day: the vows. Any issues with colour balance, from the flash bounced off the light brown stone, were fairly easily fixed in Photoshop, although the light naturally gave a fairly pleasing tone, so there wasn’t much to be done.


Outside afterwards, the it was all about wrestling with the harsh, direct sunlight. It’s not a huge problem at Dirleton Castle because there are some lovely old trees in the gardens which is where we headed for the bride and groom portraits. When I couldn’t get to shade, for instance at the front of Craigielaw for the formals, I shot into the sun as much as possible and dabbed the subjects with flash. Actually, I pretty much blasted them with flash to balance the strong sunlight.