St Andrews Graduation Photography 2024


I'm not saying the length of a photographer's commute to St Andrews for the Summer Graduation season is a competition, but if it were... 47 hours, 21 minutes - the time it takes to drive from Fairlie to Christchurch, fly Christchurch to Auckland, fly Auckland to Doha, fly Doha to Manchester, and train Manchester to Chester, drive Chester to St Andrews... you get the picture. My year abroad in New Zealand morphed into two years (no regrets!), so at first I thought that I would have to miss Grad '24. However, thanks to unprecedented interest, I was able to fund a trip back to the UK over June, plus spend a bit of time at home with my family which was lovely. I'm unbelievably grateful to my clients for making things like this possible, and so proud to be delivering a product that people value.


So, another year, and another ~60 graduates photographed. Around 50 booked, and a couple of quickfire 5 or 10 min bookings squeezed in on each day. It's nice to know that I look like I know what I'm doing enough for people to ask and trust me without seeing a portfolio! I say it every year, but St Andrews is an absolute dream in terms of photograph-able spots in close proximity - it means we can do a lot, even in just a 15 minute session.

A graduate and her girlfriend sit on a bench laughing together in St Salvator's Gardens, St Andrews.
A graduate and her family stand on a tree-lined road in St Andrews, smiling at the camera.

St Salvator's Gardens, and St Salvator's Chapel Tower, St Andrews


Every year, a few new spots emerge and become my steadfast favourites, so it's really great to revisit St Andrews year on year and build on my portfolio and the images I can offer to my grads. One such image is the image with the clock-tower below-left - the iconic St Salvator's Chapel tower featuring center stage. This year I also made use of a new flowerbed that, angled correctly, could feature the great wooden door of St Salvator's Accommodation in the background. When graduates have personal connections with these buildings that they've lived or worked in for years, I really try to focus on getting images with meaningful backgrounds, like the middle image below - without compromising on the background-silkiness and subject crispiness that characterise my images. Finally, the Cathedral ruins really stood out this year, and I perfected my location and lens choice for getting the likes of the image below-right. Among many benefits of the longer lenses I use, they grant us the compressed backgrounds like in the image below-right, where the magnificent towers of the Cathedral ruins quite rightly stand tall behind my graduates, as they would remember them from walking past them over the years. These images will definitely be cropping up in 2025 galleries and beyond.

A graduate sits in St Salvator's Quad, with the clocktower in the background, St Andrews, Scotland.
A graduate stands with her dad in St Salvator's Gardens, St Andrews, Scotland.
A graduate and her family stand in the Church of St Mary ruins, in front of the Cathedral ruins, St Andrews, Scotland.

St Andrews Graduation Photography 2025


So, with a combination of wedding and engagement bookings calling me home from New Zealand in Spring 2025, the countdown is on to St Andrews Graduation 2025.

If you're graduating and like what you see - and don't mind my internal dialogue rambling - I'd love to hear from you for 2025 :)