Wedding Photographer Ely Cathedral — the Octagon Tower, Norman Nave and Fenland Light
Ely Cathedral is one of the supreme achievements of English medieval architecture — a building that took four centuries to complete and contains, in its Octagon lantern, the greatest single feat of structural imagination of the European Middle Ages. The Octagon — built between 1322 and 1342 after the Norman crossing tower collapsed — is an eight-sided stone vault 22 metres across, topped by a wooden lantern that admits daylight from above directly onto the crossing below. For Ely Cathedral wedding photography, this means available light of extraordinary quality: the Octagon provides top-lit natural illumination in the crossing that creates a photographic environment impossible to manufacture artificially and available in no other English cathedral in quite this form.
Photography Inside Ely Cathedral
The 76-metre Norman nave is one of the longest in England and, when the cathedral is lit by available light alone on a clear day, its Romanesque alternating piers create a strong linear perspective that frames a processional or aisle portrait in a way that captures the sheer scale of the building. The Gothic Lady Chapel — attached to the north-east corner of the cathedral — is the largest individual chapel in England and has the most extensive medieval window tracery; the quality of diffused light from its north and east windows on overcast days is among the finest available for natural-light portrait photography in any English church interior. The cathedral also possesses the original monastic buildings — the Prior’s doorway, the Monks’ door and the sacrists’ gate — that provide outdoor architectural portrait settings immediately adjacent to the building.
The Cathedral Close and the Fenland Setting
The close surrounding Ely Cathedral — the Bishop’s Palace, the walled Dean’s Meadow, the medieval almonry and the cathedral school buildings — provides a self-contained landscape of medieval and Georgian domestic architecture within the cathedral’s immediate precinct. The exterior of the cathedral itself — the west end with its single surviving Norman tower, the Galilee porch and the Lady Chapel north face — provides portrait settings at ground level that are visually immediate and highly characterful without needing to enter the building. The view of the cathedral across the fenland from the A10 approach south of the city at dawn or dusk is one of the great English landscape views and worth incorporating as a location if timing allows.