1. New partners - Light and Land and Santa Fe Workshops
2.Our 2026 group Retreats programme
3. Featured Retreat - Isle of Coll
4. The Thinking Photographer’s Podcast - updates
5. 2026 Chez-nous brochures
6. Harvesting colours with Cone and sound with Merlin
7. Bonus footage
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Hello there
If, like us, you have been baked to perfection this summer we hope that it’s cooler now, where you are. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, we hope all the opposites apply. While the bee eaters continue to delight us daily as they hunt over the garden and meadow, all the other summer birds have fallen silent or left and we are in that middle season between summer and autumn. Four seasons aren’t nearly enough to express the different stages of the year here. While we would struggle to separate the 72 micro-seasons that were traditionally recognised in Japan (for a wonderful expression of this in an artist’s work, see Mary Jo Hoffman’s Still), we could definitely do with a few more. A future project using field studio photography, perhaps.
In this issue we announce a new partnership with Light and Land, one of the UK’s most established and respected photographic holiday companies. Our company is continuing just as before but with a complementary offer through Light and Land. We won’t offer the same destinations in the the same year Light and Land offers them on our behalf, after April 2026. Strategically, we are working on further refining our Chez-nous offer (below) so we become the number one destination for photographers looking to deepen their photographic knowledge and broaden their creative practice in a lovely setting with great food.
Read on, please! But first you’ll have to get past the Polish Chicken photographed at a recent market in our village here in Burgundy.
Enjoy!
With our best wishes
Charlotte and Niall
New partnerships with Light and Land and Santa Fe Workshops
Charlotte and I are natural collaborators and so the chance to work alongside Light and Land was one we couldn’t miss. I first made contact with the young company in the late 1990’s, ran a couple of trips and gave some presentations on their behalf. But these were days when, frankly, I had less to offer guests than Charlotte and I can now and I was busy with magazine work and other writing at the time anyway. The industry has changed profoundly since then and for many professionals, including myself, the focus now is on propelling our guests towards excellence and leaving a mark by sharing what we have learned during our earlier careers.
Encouragingly, our Burgundy holiday in August 2026 was sold out within 48 hours of being advertised. Others will be posted on the Light and Land site as they are finalised.
We are also delighted to work on our first in-person photography holiday for Santa Fe Workshops as part of their On Location programme - in Slovenia - in November 2026. I have given a number of on-line classes for this giant on the US photo education scene and it will be exciting to teach students in person. Even better for the guests is that Charlotte is fully involved on both these holidays, ensuring there is always good food to look forward to.
If your first reaction is, “What? Nothing in the autumn?” let us assure you that yes, we are doing Retreats and holidays then! Check out our Chez-nous brochures, below, for our 2 person Retreats here in France in the latter part of the year, watch out for more Light and Land holidays with us, and see too our Slovenian Retreat with Santa Fe Workshops. Click on the pictures below to view the brochures. The Burgundy Retreat in April is sold out.
Featured Retreat - Isles of Coll and Lunga
15 - 21 June, 2026
For the first time, in 2026, we are offering a Retreat on the much under-exposed Isle of Coll, in Scotland’s southern Hebrides. And we LOVE this place!
Coll, along with its neighbour, Tiree, is perhaps best-known for enjoying the longest hours of sunshine of anywhere in the UK. They are low-lying islands over which Atlantic weather systems sail before crashing into the mountain ranges of the mainland. Traditional ways of farming clung on here longer than in most places and it was amongst the first to see the return of that shiest - and most insistent - of farmland birds, the corncrake. Its “crecks-crecks, crecks-crecks” call resonates like a dentist’s drill, day and night in the damp, iris-packed corners of glossy pastures. Above, skylarks sing cadenzas while riding the gusting breeze and lapwings and snipe hurl themselves around the cobalt sky, points of light against the gloom over the distant mainland.
Coll is a small island indented by numerous, little visited, dune-backed beaches and, behind them on the west side of the island, machair. This is a rare type of flower-rich grassland, typically on the western side of some Hebridean islands, made fertile by calcium-rich shell sand sweetening the sour underlying peat.
In spite of its small size (13 miles end to end) Coll has plenty to hold your attention during this 6 day Retreat. After many visits, we still have places to explore and there is always an underlying excitement as we wonder what we are going to find next.
We’ve also learned how the island pace of life seeps into you and eases you into a deeper appreciation of what is around you, opens your eyes to those things that are easy to overlook.
Weather permitting, we will also make a day trip to Scotland’s Galapagos - the Isle of Lunga - which provides arguably the best opportunities for puffin photography in the country, as well as many other seabirds including guillemot, razorbill, shag, fulmar and kittiwake.
Get away from the crowds next summer and join us on Coll.
In case you haven’t listened to it yet, our podcast is live and episode 2 has just, as they say, dropped. We really appreciated the constructive feedback on the first episode and, in response, have muted the sound of the stream during the main section of the pod. I’m just glad I didn’t merge down all the tracks in Audacity when I made the recordings (a lesson transposed from Photoshop: once your layers are flattened/ tracks are merged, there is no going back).
I suspect that this, like most podcasts, stands little chance of finding an audience beyond the readers of MENUette but as I said at the top of this issue, we are collaborators and if you know of any complementary pods, please tell us. A channel always has more chance of being noticed than an individual’s podcasts, I think.
It’s not just me who has been busy in front of the microphone. Charlotte’s is now the “English Voice of Saint-Seine” having recorded the commentary for the guide to the village’s ancient church and its curious history. We’re fortunate to have one of France’s better-known voice actors, Jean Marc Galera as a neighbour and friend, and it was he who asked Charlotte to record the English commentary. Ironically, this will be heard mainly by non-French-speaking Dutch visitors as very few native English speakers come to this corner of the bocage. If you want to hear it, you’ll just need to visit us!
2026 Chez-nous brochures out now
click on the image to see the brochure
Our early 2026 Chez-nous brochures are out. If you want to progress your photography - and be treated like kings and queens - there really is nothing else like it. Let’s have a Zoom call to see what we can do for you.
Cone and Merlin apps.
If, like us, you’re the sort of person who really, really likes colour and is looking endlessly at how colours work together in nature, then the app., Cone, is for you. Thank you for the tip, Ann Marson! Here’s what it looks like in the App Store. We use the free version to record colour values of pairings we like, for future use in our design work. This may be for colouring fonts or where blocks of colour are needed on a page, or even just for visual reference when choosing paint for our home. Cone can express the colour in a variety of ways- as Pantone, CMYK, RGB, or HEX colours. In the reference images I make, below, I indicate the colour of the background using the HEX code - essentially a compact version of the RGB code. It’s perhaps not surprising that some of the appealing pairings turn out to be near complements, hence the appearance of the Flicker Effect around the text (which is sampled from the other background to allow it to stand out). Don’t you just love colour theory?!
Many of you probably already use Merlin to help you to identify birds’ calls and songs. While it’s always worth double-checking with other sources, we’ve found it pretty reliable - not least because it takes account of your location. Moreover, you can easily make a screen capture of what you’ve heard by pressing an iPhone’s wake-up and volume-up buttons simultaneously, creating a nice record - or evidence - of who’s singing. The screen grab is of a recording made in the quarry where a few of the local bee-eaters nest, 4km along our lane.
Bonus footage: Ice-encased sedum leaf
In the years before I developed the techniques I use now, I was always casting around for fall-back options in case the weather on workshops was difficult. I hated the thought of clients kicking their heels and wondering what to do next - something that hasn’t changed to this day!
One of the options involved freezing flowers or leaves in a shallow dish of water, with each end of a shoelace submerged to act as a suspension point later. Once the water was frozen solid, we would carefully remove the block from the tray and suspend it in front of a dark background. It was all a bit haphazard and unrefined, but actually quite good fun - and certainly novel at the time.
I think I might just revisit the deep-freeze. You never know what will come out.
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Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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