3. Book now for our Torridon Retreat, 13 - 20 March 2026
4. The Thinking Photographer’s Podcast
5. 2026 Chez-nous brochures out now
6. Bonus footage
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Hello there
Since this is another long MENUette, we’ll not detain you here. . . except to say that we have the first pictures of bee eaters from the quarry along our lane. Since it was quite late in the breeding cycle when I discovered the nest burrows that were being used, I’ll leave it until this winter before I install a hide, ready for next year’s Chez-nous guests. The pictures I made this year were taken remotely with the Camranger controlling the camera and 500 mm lens pointing at the nest hole from about 8 metres away. When the youngsters are nearly ready to fledge, their parents stop feeding them, to encourage them to fly the nest. So, whenever birds are calling nearby, out pops a hopeful head, only to withdraw later, disappointed. At this stage, they may be in the burrow for only another couple of days.
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Exciting news: the first of four series of our new fortnightly podcast launches on 23rd August. We’re currently planning on 24 episodes in total. Expect another mailing with information about that before too long.
With our best wishes
Charlotte and Niall
Our latest Chez-nous
We recently welcomed Catherine from Düsseldorf for one of our occasional Chez-nous for. . .one. While we can’t take single guest bookings more than 6 weeks in advance, it’s always worth getting in touch to check on availability. Chez-nous are normally for two guests at a time.
Much of Catherine’s photographic work is centred on wine and food and they provided the focus of the programme we created for her.
Her week happened to coincide with Saint-Seine’s bi-weekly evening market and whatever their photographic interest, guests enjoy attending it to experience a slice of genuine, French village life. That involves long tables set out in the square, stall holders, a lot of food, music, wine and chat. Go into Saint-Seine during the day and you’d think the plague had been through. But turn up on a market night and you’ll be joining a lively throng of 300 or so. It is, as they say, très vivante.
My principle role this year is as. . . chief dog photographer. Three years ago, Charlotte and I photographed around 200 villagers and visitors at these market evenings. This time, it’s the turn of their dogs. Actually, I thought it would exclusively be dogs, but one lady brought along two super-chilled Birman (I believe that is the breed) cats in a rucksack. They took it in their stride.
We set up a 70 cm Elinchrom Deep Octa with Quadra head as the key light to the left, a high “hair light” Quadra with a honeycomb grid to focus the light, behind, and provided light-from-the-right with a speed-light behind an 80 cm Lastolite diffuser, slightly from behind. Sweet and safe lighting (that is, it doesn’t matter if the subject turns) . The backdrop is a wall beside the mayor’s office.
Given the focus of the week, it’s not surprising that we made extensive use of our flash gear, although most of the time we needed just one head. While many food photographers use only daylight, I prefer the dependability and control of flash so long as the light can be shaped sympathetically. Recently, I’ve simplified my standard set-up by changing to a single 120 cm x 30 cm strip softbox with a Quadra head inside and a long piece of black closed cell foam to create my “dark space”. Normally, I position the softbox about 20 cm above the level of the set to show texture, with local foil fillers where needed (you can get a hint of one of these on the shaded side of the Chaource cheese with red peppercorns, below).
In truth, the hardest part of making food pictures, I think, is the styling. Since these are not product shots, a story has to be constructed for the picture to follow. The story informs the choice of props, presentation of the food, the lighting and background. “The story” may be no more complex than “two friends having coffee and cake in an old English cafe on a wet Sunday afternoon” but each of these descriptors suggests how the picture could be styled. It’s a bit like feeding prompts into an AI model - only you are generating the image from your own experience, with your own intuition, and your own props.
I confess that I find photographing bottles challenging. But I do know it’s better tackled with flash than daylight alone, if you want a polished look to the photograph. The principal highlights on the shot above were created by flashes in two strip softboxes fired through translucent sheets of plexiglass, just out of shot. This is a case where double diffusion (of the flash by the softboxes and the softbox light by the plexiglass) is essential to get a natural-looking highlight. The only problem is that if you want the reflection to go the the bottom of the bottle you need, either, to look down more on the bottle or have the piece of plexiglass really close to the bottle. The smart thing to do is to turn the bottle face on and let the label cover the fade-away zone. Alternatively, you can do what we did and use the reflection of the glass to fill that space.
Charlotte’s homemade white grape gin provided a different set of challenges, not least in lighting the grapes without the glass on the front of the bottle being degraded by reflections. We used the same lighting set up as for the wine, only positioned the front plexiglass a little further back. It would have been good, perhaps to introduce some light from behind the grapes to add depth. It’s a fiddle doing this the conventional way, with an angled reflector behind the bottle and directing a tightly focused beam on it. For my next shoot, I will use a little LED panel, such as this one from Smallrig, instead.
If you’ve read previous issues of MENUette, you’ll know I advocate that photographers learn a desk-top publishing application, ideally Affinity Publisher, so they can present their work in a professional fashion. In my practice, Publisher and its siblings, Designer and Photo, also play a big role in the creation process. BUT, I have yet to be able to reproduce “ Niall’s best watercolour brush” I made in Photoshop years ago, in these apps. I normally use the brush on my botanical illustrations to pick out and represent colours but this time we wanted to highlight the changing colours of maturing wine grapes. I started by marking dots, two centimetres apart, in a straight line across a piece of textured card. Next, I stuck tiny cubes of Blutac® on the dots and depressed the centres of them with a pencil to create small hollows for the tiny grapes to sit on. The strip softbox was laid flat on the floor near the paper, to show the paper’s texture and cast faint shadows, largely filled by a white reflector on the opposite side. Lastly, we sampled colours from the grapes themselves to make the “splodges” on the page and added the text. Voilà.
Remember Le Moine Errant, The Wandering Monk? Well, he made an appearance again, this time enjoying a bottle of wine in what looks like the end of times. And who can blame him?
Thank you, Catherine, for a week of good company, testing my lighting skills and making us a lot less ignorant about wine. Bruno says. “woof”.
Announcing BOXER Photoshop plug-in
Our Colour Transects and Chocolate Bars concepts have recently received a big boost with the development of a Photoshop Plug-in, BOXER, by our friend, Richard Craddock. While I use our own Affinity Publisher templates, Richard’s plug-in provides a versatile and elegant alternative for those who haven’t bought into the Affinity Suite and who have an Adobe subscription.
The examples here, show it being used to create Colour Transects but it is equally capable when it comes to making Chocolate Bar collages. One of the outstanding features is how, from the three pre-positioned sampling lines, BOXER automatically samples colours from the image and populates the boxes. But better still, the user can take complete control over the colour selection process. Bring up the Paths tab, select any of the sampling lines and, with the Direct Selection tool switched on, move any of the points to exactly where YOU want the sample to be taken from. Hit the blue button, allow the app. time to re-sample then see the boxes change to the new colours.
While Richard welcomes feedback, he is busy training daily for The World Triathalon Championship Finals in Wollongong, NSW, in October so he’s taken time to create a pretty comprehensive set of user instructions for BOXER. They are helpful even to those of us who think we don’t need instructions! Have fun.
Book now for our Torridon Retreat, 13 - 20 March 2026
Our first group Retreat of 2026 will be in Torridon in the north-west highlands of Scotland and we look forward to showing you the photographic gems contained in this area. We’ll be catering for you in a house in the heart of it all, with several key locations a short drive away.
Over the last 25 years, we have spent a lot of time in this area, holidaying and shooting personal work and commissions for the government agency, Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot). It manages this, the UK’s first National Nature Reserve, founded in 1951 in recognition of its internationally important flora–principally of mosses, lichens and liverworts. It is also a redoubt of the once vast Scots pine forest that covered much of the Scottish Highlands for thousands of years but which has been reduced to a few scraps and remnants. At Beinn Eighe, we can see the work being done to re-establish a corridor of woodland from the pine-clad slopes above Loch Maree, down the length of Glen Torridon, to join with other fragments of old forest around Shieldaig.
Mountains built from Torridonian sandstone, capped by glistening quartzite, seem to fill the sky. While it’s not necessary to climb to gain a good vantage point, doing so can bring its own rewards. The summits conjure with clouds rushing in from the Atlantic to produce squalls then drizzle then brilliant sunshine then hail–all within an hour. On other days it is utterly still and the dark lochs fill with reflections of ereeds and sombre mountains. It’s as if the whole landscape is holding its breathe: a time to be quiet ourselves and get a sense of the endurance of life here.
Like most of the rest of the world, we don’t listen to much live radio these days, preferring instead the choice and convenience that on-demand services provide. But even they, sometimes, don’t quite hold the attention in the way that niche podcasts do. And while, strictly speaking, the world may not need another podcast, I’d like to think that at least a few people are interested in the ideas, rather than just the technicalities, that inform how and why photographic art is made. So that’s what this is about. Here is the schedule for series one:
AI and photography.
As AI technology seeps into more and more corners of our lives, Niall makes the case for nature photography to remain real - and describes hurdles AI just can’t cross.
Urbex photography.
In recent years, Niall has made a side-gig of urbex photography. But is this really any surprise for a nature photographer? This episode encourages you to re-evaluate your concept of “nature photography” and appreciate the fragility of culture.
The Big Division.
You can probably think of many, but this week, Niall describes what he sees at the two fundamentally different types of photograph that arise from a desire either to tell a story or, simply, to describe the appearance of things. It pays to know which you’re making before you release the shutter.
What the heck is “fine art nature photography”?
Is “fine art photography” a term bandied around to make generic photography seem more serious - or just a sales ruse. Niall probes this question and describes why most of his work is certainly not “art” - but some might be.
Life. Only on Earth.
Niall asks why there is a fascination with lifeless planets while life on Earth is so gravely imperiled - and gains an insight into miracles in the process.
Moving away.
Niall and Charlotte moved from Scotland to live in France at the height of the pandemic. In the final episode of this first series you can learn about the creative challenges and opportunities moving away from what is familiar, creates.
These are scripted, quite short podcasts (typically under 10 minutes) and might just be the thing to jiggle the neurons around at coffee time. We will send out another mailshot closer to launch with information on where to find the pods and their show notes.
2026 Chez-nous brochures out now
click on the image to see the brochure
We’re glad to say that 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.
If you’ve not yet taken the opportunity to enjoy these free 😳 e-books already, click on the button to access them.
We have an intriguing book, Ailleurs en France (Elsewhere, in France), which draws often convincing comparisons between French landscapes and features and those in other parts of the world. Flicking through it the other day, my attention was caught by somewhere Charlotte and I visited three years ago - La Casse Déserte at the top of the Col D’Izoard in the Queyras part of the Haut Alpes. While the comparison with Jordan’s Wadi Rum was a bit of a stretch (La Casse is gysum and limestone rather than sandstone and granite) the two places share a bleak, off-planet appearance.
I wondered what the cyclists following the famous Tour de France stage made of it after such a punishing climb - it was certainly not an ascent to heaven. Rather like the stoney barren lands revealed by retreating glaciers, these places make me wonder why anyone (eh, Mr Tesla?) could image that living on a lifeless planet is endurable.
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Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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