In the spring of 1843, a young engineer named Robert Adamson set up a studio at Rock House, on the slopes of Calton Hill. Together with the painter David Octavius Hill, he spent the next few years photographing the people of Edinburgh: ministers, writers, the fishwives of Newhaven. Their process needed strong daylight, so most of their sitters posed outdoors, in the garden behind the house.
Those portraits, among the earliest ever made with a camera, are still kept today by the National Galleries of Scotland. Almost two centuries later, their faces still look back at us.
It is hard not to think of them when working on the same hill. The technology has changed beyond recognition, but what makes a portrait last has not. A real person, a real place, a moment worth keeping. Perhaps that is the real value of a vacation photoshoot in Edinburgh. Not the novelty of being photographed, but a souvenir that still means something long after the trip.
Why Photos Outlast Souvenirs
Most trips end the same way, with a few objects in the suitcase and hundreds of pictures on a phone. The castle, the Royal Mile, the view from the hill. What is usually missing are the people who made the journey, because someone always has to hold the camera.
A portrait fills that gap in a way an object cannot. It records not only where you were, but how you were. It keeps the way you stood together against the wind, the coat bought on the second day, the laugh that came when no one was trying to look good. Those are the images that end up framed, sent to family, and returned to years later.
Stories From Behind My Camera
A few sessions have stayed with me.
The honeymoon. A couple came to Edinburgh at the very beginning of their marriage and wanted something quieter than the classic view of the castle. We spent much of the session in the closes, the narrow lanes that fall away on either side of the Royal Mile. Each once took its name from a notable resident or from the trade carried on there, so each still holds a small story of its own. It felt like the right setting for a new one.
The anniversary. A couple celebrating twenty-five years together, and a husband who was, at first, not entirely convinced. Somewhere in the Old Town that evening, he told his wife, more than once, how glad he was that they had done it. Twenty-five years deserve a better record than a photograph taken at arm’s length.
The rain. Edinburgh’s weather is part of its character. Besides the rain, the city knows the haar, a cold sea mist that an easterly wind carries in from the North Sea, softening the stone and swallowing the skyline. On one wet November day we simply carried on, and the umbrella I had brought for shelter became part of the photographs. Photographers go to great lengths to create soft, even light; here, the weather often provides it.
The quiet one. One client told me at the start that she was very shy. Before we began, she and her partner told me about the places they hoped to see and the things they cared about, and we shaped the session around them. Once it felt like their story rather than a performance, the hesitation faded, and it shows in the pictures.
“But We’re Not Really Photo People”
I hear this more often than almost anything else, and I have come to take it as a good sign. Very few of the people I photograph are used to a camera, and the stiffness everyone expects rarely outlasts the first street or two.
What changes things is usually conversation rather than direction. We talk about the city’s past, about where they ate the night before, about what brought them to Scotland. Somewhere along the way the camera stops being the centre of attention, and the photographs that follow tend to be the ones people keep.
Edinburgh Does Half the Work
Few cities offer so much within walking distance. The Old Town gives you stone, shadow and centuries of history. Around the castle, the views are the ones you know from postcards, except that this time you are in them. Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat, the remains of an ancient volcano, bring open landscape without leaving the city.
Then there is Calton Hill, with some of the finest evening light in Edinburgh. At its summit stand the twelve columns of the National Monument, modelled on the Parthenon and left unfinished when the money ran out in 1829. A few steps away, the round Dugald Stewart Monument borrows its form from the Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. Buildings like these helped give the city its nickname, the Athens of the North. Being Greek, I find them a quietly familiar sight.
Each of these places carries a different mood, and the part of the work I enjoy most is finding the one that fits the people in front of the camera, whether a couple or a whole family.
Bring Home Something That Lasts
Hill and Adamson could not have known that their portraits would still be looked at nearly two hundred years later. Yours need not last quite that long. But a photograph of the two of you, or of the whole family, in a city you loved, tends to outlive every other souvenir of the trip.
If you are planning a visit to Edinburgh and would like to take home something of this kind, you can read more about my sessions, or simply write to me.