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Hello there
We’ll have to be very brief this month. And you’d don’t have much time to read this anyway, right? We’re cracking on with Travels with my cake tins and time is short before other work starts again. Most to the copy is written - and it’s going to top out at about 45 000 words - and the next big job is re-shooting many of the older recipe photos as well as making new ones for other recipes. Niall spent half a day creating the Master Pages in Affinity and that is greatly speeding up the process of laying the book out.
You may also have noticed that Iceland has quietly slipped off the itineraries of many UK-based photo holiday providers (including us) as new regulations concerning foreign tour operators come into force. The conditions of these are proving too onerous for smaller operators and if you’re tempted to join a trip organised by a non-Icelandic company, it’s wise to check out their compliance first.
With our best wishes
Charlotte and Niall
Islay, 19 - 26 September 2026
with Willi Rolfes
We’re excited (and who wouldn’t be?) to be returning to the Queen of the Hebrides, Islay, this September and would like to invite you to join us there. Even better, we will be running it in conjunction with one of Germany’s leading nature photographers, Willi Rolfes, with whom quite a number of you have travelled before. Willi is generous when it comes to sharing his huge experience and we think it’s helpful to you to be able to offer you contrasting photographic perspectives. Willi’s English, by the way, is excellent. If you’ve not been to Islay, you’re in for a treat and if you have, you’ll know just how much there is to photograph there.
Just in case you’re not familiar with the concept (and even if you didn’t know it had a name, you’ll already be aware of it, anyway) the progress fallacy argues that the things we regard as progressive and improving often have hidden consequences that are deleterious and emerge only after the “advance” has been embraced and normalised. More simply, I think of it as creating two new problems by solving one. Often these advances are intended benignly but without the consequential costs being taken into account, new problems emerge. The development of IR8 rice in the 1960’s was a case in point. This new variety boosted yields four-fold an in doing so, lifted the spectre of famine from many communities across south east Asia. The lag time between lower mortality and realising the need to lower birth rates lead to spikes in population with all the problems that attend that.
You’d think that we would have become more sophisticated and realise that Cause= Effect+X by now but the tech. bros. obviously aren’t been students of history and with AI in its many iterations
2026 Chez-nous brochures out now
click on the image to see the brochure
Our 2026 brochures for Reteats with us in Burgundy 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.
Bonus footage: grey heron, Mains of Usan
At the start of my career in the early 1990’s, I bought a lot of nature photography books but one that made a bigger impact than most was Wild Birds of Canada, by Tim Fitzharris. I was enchanted by his water level shots of ducks, herons and waders and soon set about building my own amphibious hide (below) to achieve a similar look. I loved the fact that I could move this hide around, be that in shallow water or on land and, since the hide appeared to the birds from the water, rather than the land, there was not an automatic association with a human being. Even a cramped and very cold one.
These were film days, of course, with limited chances for action photography but herons are very good at staying stock still as they are hunting. With the hide jammed against a bank, I was about to make some sharp exposures early on this June morning, just as the sun began to graze the bank opposite me.
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Many thanks,
Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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