For some, the weekend roughly translates as 'an opportunity to ply ourselves with alcohol and deal with the consequences later'. Pubs, clubs and drinking in public spaces in Edinburgh is something that happens every day.
Going back some 180 years, drinking real ale wasn't uncommon, but snapping a picture of someone falling flat on their face was. Social media apps platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat are regularly used to spread videos or photos of people that are making a fool of themselves.
In 1844, however, the first image of locals enjoying a pint of ale was snapped in Edinburgh, a rather interesting fact that is unknown to many. A picture captured by a local of people enjoying a laugh and joke while boozing it up still seems so relevant that it could have been taken yesterday, if those in the picture were dressed like the younger generation of today.
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It was snapped just four years after photography was introduced to the world, and shows three men drinking Edinburgh Ale, laughing, and no doubt wondering how many more they can sink without having a massive hangover the following day.
The iconic image is the work of pioneering Edinburgh photographers David Octavius Hill - an established landscape painter - and engineer and chemist Robert Adamson.
David Hill is the amused man on the right, leaning on his pal's shoulder and having a good laugh.
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The man in the middle of the image is Dr George Bell, a hugely influential figure in 19th-century Edinburgh. He was one of the commissioners of the Poor Law of 1845, which was brought in to benefit and support destitute people in Scotland. The man on the left is James Ballantine, a writer and stained-glass artist.
Although it does look like a typical, riotous scene in a 2019 Wetherspoons, the three small glasses - known as "ale flutes" that the trio are drinking from are quite different to the pint glasses of today. The reason that beer was consumed in smaller quantities back then was because it was often very strong.
One contemporary account describes a popular Edinburgh ale (Younger's) as "a potent fluid, which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle."
Hill and Adamson founded the first ever photography studio in Edinburgh; it was situated in Rock House on Calton Hill. The pair produced over 3000 prints during their collaboration, including a famous image of two little girls and their puppy, which is on display at the National Gallery of Scotland.
Sadly, their partnership was cut short by the untimely death of Adamson. The Scottish chemist died on 14 January 1848, at the age of 26.
But despite their relatively short career, the productive pair managed to take over 3000 images that helped to shape modern portrait photography, as well as influencing Scotland's political landscape.
They used something called the "calotype process" to produce the photos, an early photographic technique introduced by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, where a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride is exposed to light in a camera obscura.
Sadly, Hill's photographic efforts after the death of Adamson weren't nearly as good - it's thought that Hill was good at coming up with subjects and compositions, but that Adamson was better at the technical processes involved.
If he'd lived, they would have no doubt gone on to produce even more fantastic photos like the one above, all from their little studio on Calton Hill.
This article was originally published on January 7, 2019.
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