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Hello there
This is a LONG newsletter, I know. I hope you’ll indulge us by reading to the end of it. That being so, for once I won’t detain you here with the habitual musings and let you get stuck right in.
Bon appetit!
We hope to see you soon.
Charlotte and Niall
April 2025 Chez-nous
We welcomed aunt and niece, Kathy and Kate, from Toronto and Ottawa respectively, for our most recent Chez-nous Retreat. Kathy had travelled with us several times before and although Kate hadn’t, I think she was encouraged to come along by her aunt’s stories about what we do. With their objectives loosely decided over a Zoom call ahead of the Retreat, we quickly got down to a diverse programme of landscape, wildlife, Chocolate Bars, field studio, dereliction and decay (D and D) and street-scene photography.
Our favourite local town for gathering Chocolate Bar elements and street-scenes is Moulins Engilbert, population c 1500, excluding the hens. There is something about the variety of architectural styles, colours, and quirky details that make it more alluring than many bigger settlements in the area. While few of the villages in our area are, by Norwegian standards, super-smart, their imperfection lends the houses a charm that is absent on modern buildings with water-penetrated harling that we see so often in Scotland.
Although a little early in the season, we visited our local white stork colony to see what stage they had reached- clearly the one that involves a lot of loafing about the nest and making eyes and clacking bills at one another. This year, though, a relatively low, open nest is occupied, with the prospect of some great opportunities later in the season once the birds are feeding young. Although the storks are a bit indolent at the moment, there is plenty else happening, with flights of cattle egrets jetting overhead, several singing nightingales, the gasping croon of turtle doves and honey-smooth notes of a golden oriole’s song darting through the canopy.
For D and D, we returned to my current favourite location - an abandoned château’s out-buildings not too far from home. Every shoot at places like this are precious as future access - and safety - is never guaranteed. But we’re always on the lookout for new ones - and there is a lot of derelict property in Nièvre and neighbouring départements.
From the ridiculous to the sublime…The lovely château over-looking the gardens at Apremont-sur-Allier is back-lit for much of the day but with modern sensors and the right post-production it renders softly and beautifully. Never underestimate the ability of a linear gradient in LR to give the impression of a passing cloud - and to diminish an over-bearing foreground. The village below the château, although very small, is nevertheless full of great detail and colour.
We love spending time in the town at the centre of Burgundy wine country, Beaune, and its surrounding villages. Here the stone is no longer the grey granite of the Morvan but instead is honey-hued, providing a delicately complementary background to the Wisteria when it’s in full bloom. Unfortunately, the vineyards were not leafed-out thanks to weather that was chillier than it had been at the start of the month. Nevertheless, in our quest for fresh locations from which to shoot the vineyards, we discovered a new large colony of lizard orchids and other calciphiles. Yay!
We shared LR presets to help Kate and Kathy with colour grading their images. I think that pictures of these old villages always benefit from this treatment, acquiring airiness and subtle colour shifts that add to their sense of “otherness”, of being at one remove from our everyday experience of things. Sometimes there is a case to be made for interpreting rather than simply representing. I’ve done it here to idealise imperfection - but maybe you will have other reasons in your own practice.
No matter how much fun the photography, we think that guests value our hospitality and, in particular, Charlotte’s meals at least as highly. She doesn’t cut corners in the quality of the ingredients she uses, is endlessly accommodating of preferences and presents very photogenic food. And of course, food photography is something else we offer..!
If you fancy joining us for a Chez-nous, we still have some availability this summer. Drop us a line!
We have also updated our Autumn 2025 brochure and just published the Winter 2025-26 one. There are limited slots so secure your place as soon as you can.
ISLAY’S BLEND OF IMPROVED grassland, wild moor and a coastline gnawed raw by the Atlantic make it an intriguing proposition for the photographer. The cultural landscape enhances, rather than diminishes, the island’s natural wealth, attracting huge numbers of wintering barnacle and white fronted geese and providing a home for many brown hares. The chough, that iconic crow of the Celtic fringes, is favoured by the presence of cattle on coastal pastures and even corncrakes have returned to slink between the irises that crowd damp field edges and disturb light summer nights. While the corncrakes won’t yet have arrived from Africa, chough are resident and we may have a chance to photograph them in a stormy sky.
It is on the coast, however, that we find real wilderness unmediated by people. The island’s geological and glacial history have given rise to the whole gamut of coastal geomorphology from cliffs and arches; to stacks and geos; to sandy beaches and mudflats. We’ll be hoping for strong easterly winds. Under these conditions, waves that have a reach the width of the north Atlantic build and come racing into the western bays with spray flying out behind them– and not into your lens. Rich in texture, form and colour and constantly worried by the Atlantic, the dynamic coastline of Islay is spellbinding….
Interested? Read more in the brochure, below. This Retreat is currently half-full so don’t leave it too late to experience The Queen of the Hebrides.
Perhaps you are familiar with the work of German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich? He’s a bit of a darling amongst many landscape photographers. This is a maybe odd given his fondness of the Rückenfigur device and how assiduously most landscape photographers avoid representing people in their images, even from behind. But of course, there are other sublime dimensions to his work.
For my part, I’ve grown increasingly uneasy about the absence of people in my landscapes given that almost all the ones I visit have, to a greater or lesser extent, been shaped by people. Students are probably growing weary now of me comparing the landscape to an empty stage set that, no matter how carefully lit or thoughtfully furnished, becomes animated only with the appearance of the characters.
I thought long and hard about what form my character would take. The theme I want to illustrate in the set of pictures is displacement caused by the warming climate, surely one of the big crises of the coming decades. Initially, I toyed with the idea of a deep-sea fisherman in oilskins wandering the French countryside. Ultimately, though, I settled on the le moine errant, the wandering monk, with implications of pilgrimage and the search for sanctuary. To be honest, there are practical advantages of this character, too; the hood serves to hide the face, the long robes allow the model to wear regular clothes beneath. The character is instantly recognisable and known. And at last, the much-cherished beech staff I fashioned from a branch from a favourite forest in Scotland, comes into its own.
There are practical considerations when making these pictures not least, how do I take them if I am being the monk (Kate obligingly put on a few years - and the habit - for this picture)? Ultimately, the answer will be the iPad with a means to remotely shoot and review, such as the new iteration of the Camranger (I quite likely the Mark I version and this one is much improved). For now, it’s a matter of making a run to my spikes or have another body inside the robes. Are you busy, Charlotte..? I thought so.
Never again will I have to look for a focal point in the landscape. If you’re coming on our fully-booked Elbe Sandstone Mountains Retreat this November, you’ll have a chance to “frame the Franciscan” yourself. Or else on Islay, you may want to recreate one of Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea. Only we’ll make him a bit bigger…
Emsland exhibition opening
I’m grateful to Dr Michael Haverkamp, soon-to-be retired Director of the Emsland Moormuseum for enabling my new, recently-opened, exhibition. With the 40 composites I made for the commission on display, this is the largest (and, in all honesty, the first proper) exhibition of my field studio work on 18 years.
No chance of getting to Emsland (never so beautiful as when the potatoes are in bloom…)? Don’t worry; you can still see the pictures in this German language (via DeepL) catalogue.
If you’ve not yet taken the opportunity to enjoy these free 😳 e-books already, click on the button to access them.
Of the different one-to-one on-line classes I give live, the field studio one is perhaps my favourite. I know that afterwards, to prepare their homework, the student is going to experience that magic combination of sharpness and brilliance which characterises this sort of photograph. And there is a chance they will be able to do it with equipment they have already - it just needs two simple flashes, a remote trigger, a diffuser and a translucent white background.
The beauty of field studio photography is not only that it allows you to make never-before-seen images but it incorporates many skills transferrable to diverse photographic arenas, from portraiture to product photography. The Advanced extension to the basic course deepens your post-production expertise. If you’re interested, just drop us a line. It’s a great time of year to learn these new skills
It seems to me that whenever our minds turn towards things existential, we act as it we’ve bitten into a sour strawberry and quickly spit it out. Or think of something nicer. All of us who have been awake for the last 30 years are well aware of how often, when a grave environmental risk comes to light (the exception being action on CFCs to allow the ozone layer to repair) something else crops up to demand our attention instead, be it in the US, Iraq, Afghanistan or Ukraine. Dealing with that existential matter is delayed, often denied, certainly pushed further down the road in the hope, perhaps, that it will go away. We’ll see about that.
This stand-out rock ptarmigan could be seen as symbolising that things are not right in the uplands or in the arctic - that the conditions it evolved in and which afforded it protection no longer pertain. But practically, from its perspective, it is simply an easy target in a hostile environment. In this, and other arenas, the predators are in the ascendant.
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Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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