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Hello there
Niall: You may feel that writing about photography holidays at a time when the world order is being up-ended - when right and wrong are giving way to advantage and disadvantage - is a bit frivolous. If so, I’m sorry. Nevertheless, I have long taken comfort in my inability to sway world events (!), indeed to have much influence over anything of consequence. Instead, I can surrender to the ineffability of natural processes - photosynthesis and the carbon cycle more generally, erosion and orogenesis - knowing that even the most hubristic clowns hold no sway over them. It’s a world in which we can all find the solace of the flea on the hedgehog. And stay a little sane in the process.
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À bientôt
Charlotte and Niall
Harris Retreat Report
Perhaps you recall at the end of the last MENUette, I asked you to cross your fingers, toes, eyes etc. for us to have a trouble-free crossing to Harris in mid-February. Well thank you, it worked - not only for our crossings but for the whole duration of the Retreat. Now, we like atmospheric weather as much as the next photo holiday company BUT it was just so nice, so much more productive, so much more enjoyable, to have seven consecutive dry, calm and sunny days on Harris and Lewis. We’ve never before experienced weather like it on the Outer Hebrides - or so much lovely edge-of-the-day light.
Just in case you aren’t familiar with the Lewis and Harris. it basically goes like this. Harris: extraordinary beaches, a fabulous distillery, bleak farms, a (normally grim) cnoc and lochan interior comprised of 3500 million year old Lewisian Gneiss. Once part of Laurentia, but the Canadians have expressed no interest in having it back. Lewis: big, boggy, brilliant megaliths (Callanish) and increasingly boring as you go further north.
Well, that’s how you feel if you’ve spend a week in the Outer Hebrides in the rain, which we have done in the past. But not so this time. The interior of Harris, normally so intractable, so stubbornly hard in every sense was buttered up by late afternoon sunlight and showed us a previously unknown, gentler side. The Golden Road, from where the picture below was taken, somehow lived up to its name.
Sometimes, we need to make several visits to a beach before we get optimal conditions but this time we could be sure of a palette that extended beyond Payne’s Grey and Mint Aquafresh, most dawns and afternoons.
We arrived at the saltmarshes at Northton, Harris in the gloaming, where most of us managed to avoid slipping into the brine, Helen. This location is always a bit of a challenge to frame as it’s quite hard to get over to the grass banks in the middle of the saltmarsh, without falling in. That’s easily done. The big surprise at Northton village comes once you’ve driven along its elegantly pot-holed street, past trees auditioning for a Halloween horror feature and reach what you take to be an uncharted dead end at the edge of the known world. This is actually where the beach starts - and it is a white shell sand beauty in the best traditions of Harris. Here, the prevailing westerlies blow the powdered bodies and shells of uncountable small lives on-shore to sweeten the sour peat and form the flower-rich machair for which this island is famed.
Good fortune continued to accompany us on the Isle of Lewis (Lewis and Harris are actually conjoined). Any time I’ve been to the 5000 year old Callanish Stones monument in the last 10 years, building work around the site has knocked photography on the head. There is currently a major renovation of the visitor’s centre underway and the site looked even more un-photographable than ever - until a helpful workman directed us to a different access point. There, with uninterrupted viewpoints, we worked the stones in bright sunlight which, along with the rich blue sky, made for some striking black and white photographs.
Our end-goal on Lewis is always the west-facing sea stacks at Mangersta, a good 2 ½ hour drive from our base on Harris. Every previous approach has been thwarted by southerly gales, which makes getting to the best viewpoint highly dangerous as the wind buffets you towards the cliff edge. Our luck held, though, and in the sunset’s afterglow, the cliffs and stacks of Mangersta acquired a rare calm.
In spite of kitchen challenges - Team Lobster comprised solely of Charlotte this time, our guests enjoyed a characteristically varied and imaginative menu - this was what Charlotte served on St Valentine’s Day:
For those of you on non-standard diets, don’t forget that Charlotte goes the extra mile not only to accommodate those needs but to serve something as delicious as everyone is having. She does, however, draw the line at the Paleolithic Diet. If you want to follow that on our Retreats, please bring you own seaweed.
On our journey back to France, we followed up a lead one of our guests had given us. On the BBC’s iPlayer a “Hebri-Noir” called An t-Eilean - The Island was playing (and still is). It’s the biggest budget Gaelic language drama series the BBC has commissioned (and it has English sub-titles) and I think it establishes Harris and Lewis as a pre-eminent location for Nordic Noir, easily on a par with many Scandi-Noir locations in Iceland and Norway. We recognised all the spots!
If you’ve not yet taken the opportunity to enjoy these free 😳 e-books already, click on the button to access them.
Take the road to the isles with us and discover two of the Hebrides’ most enchanting islands.
Niall: It’s 41 years since I first visited Islay as a callow youth but even then I realised that this was somewhere I would want to return to again and again. I did, and for the last ten years, we’ve been delighting in sharing it with other photographers.
Islay is our favourite Scottish island, and one we’ve visited more than 20 times since the mid-1980’s. It’s the mix of cultural landscape and wilderness, of bright green pastures abutted by moorland and a coastline worried ragged by the Atlantic, that make it so enchanting. That, along with huge skeins of barnacle and white fronted geese, seals, goats, choughs and fabulous geology keeps drawing us back. Oh, and there are the distilleries and lighthouses too.
Some of the locations we plan to visit include:
Carraig Fhada twin lighthouse
Saligo and Machir Bays
Portnahaven harbour
The 1300 year old Kildalton High Cross
A distillery or two
Feral goats near the Singing Sands
The Isle of Jura and its herds of red deer and old buildings
One the the best locations for geological details in the west
Around Loch Indaal for barnacle and white fronted geese
The sands of Laggan
A hidden beach on the Oa
…and lots more! .
We will be staying in comfortable modern accommodation in Bowmore, putting us within easy striking distance of many of our main locationsThe brochure will be ready before the end of the month but if you’d like to reserve your spot now, just drop us a line.
Chez-nous Retreats, as you probably know by now, take place at our home in Burgundy, allowing us to deploy all our resources to teach you new skills, introduce you to new photographic experiences and provide you with a lot of rather nice food in a comfortable, relaxing setting. And it’s just for two photographers at a time. Or even a photographer and a cook who wants to brush up their skills alongside Charlotte.
Join us for a “proper” summer in Burgundy when we can divide your day so you are shooting early and late when it is cooler and work on developing your post-production and other skills indoors in the heat of the day.
Of the the many advantages of this sort of Retreat is that you call the shots with regards to what you would like to work on and from this we devise a programme to advance you in that field.
Whether you are into wildlife photography and field studio work (below and above), landscape or urbex or want help to refine your still-life lighting skills or prepare a book for Blurb, we can help you extend your technical skills and creative mindset. And give you a relaxing holiday too.
If you’re weary of taking the same old photos, this might be just the tonic to restore your “mo-pho” (motivation to photograph). Just contact us to set up a Zoom meeting and we will have a chat to see what we can do for you.
Bonus footage:
Tiguan in trouble
Iceland, aside from its familiar natural spectacles was always and interesting place for us to people-watch or, more particularly, to watch how people conducted themselves in often dangerous environments. I’m glad to say that we didn’t see anyone injured but we did witness some spectacular soakings, snapped tripods and drowned camera bags. And then there were the cars driven where no car should be driven. No wonder if costs so much to hire a car in Iceland. This poor VW Tiguan had dug itself deeply into the soft black lava sand over the road from Jökulsárlón, well away from the, albeit informal, car park. I made up the picture to resemble a car advert from the 1990’s, dropping in an appropriate comment in the corner.
VW have never approached me to buy the rights.
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Many thanks,
Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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