1. Our first tour for Light and Land - in Burgundy
2. Travel with my cake tins available now!
3. Recipe: Poulet Chasseur with Tarragon
4. Life beyond dawn and dusk and how to process it
4. Bonus footage
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Hello there
It’s been great to get back into our stride again with Chez-nous guests and a group for Light and Land, here in Burgundy. But please don’t think that we’ve stopped running our own group Retreats. Far from it! A couple of these next year are for groups of friends who have approached us directly so these are not on our site. If you are part of a group of friends (minimum 4) and would like us to put a Retreat together for you, just drop us a line to see what we can do for you.
We’re heading back to Scotland soon and over to Islay for one of our own group Retreats and it will be a relief to inhale some of that cool, damp Atlantic air again. We’ve had only about 28cm of rain (less than a foot) in the southern Morvan since March as well as the hottest summer on record. You can have too much of a good thing.
I admire those creatures and plants that seem indifferent to the enervating heat and drought: the talkative bee eaters perched on roadside wires beside our house; the common toadflax and wild carrot that seem to be able to thrive in the absence of soil moisture; and the preying mantids that swivel their heads towards you in the most unnerving fashion. But others - the wasp spiders, scarlet darters and woodchat shrikes- have been sorely missed this year and we keenly await their return next year.
Our best wishes
Charlotte and Niall
Our first tour for Light and Land - in Burgundy
It’s 20 years since I last led a photo holiday for Light and Land and this August’s in Burgundy was the first to have Charlotte on board as host and cook. And what a difference that made in respect of the guests’ enjoyment and the flexibiliity of timing this afforded us. We also welcomed Freddie, Charlotte’s nephew, into the ranks of Team Lobster (you can read all about that in Travels with my cake tins, below). Freddie not only helped out on the hospitality side of things but made a very capable Moine Errant (Wandering Monk). For once, the monk abandoned his habitual Rüchenfigur aspect and instead showed his face - the face of an uncertain young monk wandering the countryside relying on the generosity of strangers. (My project featuring the Wandering Monk, incidentally, is all about dislocation and migration. The mendicant monk is a metaphor for the millions who are likely to be displaced as parts of the world become uninhabitable in years to come and who are forced to throw themselves on the mercy of others- as the mendicant Franciscans have done, traditionally).
One real issue arose during this shoot; using flash has got a whole lot more complicated with mirrorless cameras. The first problem centres around “exposure simulation” - the camera’s ability to create an impression in the viewfinder of what the final image will look like according to your exposure settings. While that may work fine in daylight, it’s a liability when you are working in a dark place - like this forest - providing the light for the subject with flash. So, please find out how to disable your camera’s exposure simulation mode if you want to use flash. Getting the camera to synchronise with the flash presented even more problems and I’d recommend that you tell me your camera model before a trip with us so that I can research how to get it working with flash; there are many applications for it I wouldn’t like you to miss out on.
We based this Light and Land holiday in the old spa town of St Honoré-les-Bains for its shabby-gentility (not the accommodation, of course!) and proximity to sites we regularly photograph. Given the extravagance of many of the buildings (not to say their eccentricity), the village has clearly been very prosperous at one time but much of that prosperity seems to have fled, something we see time after time in our department. Nevertheless, that offers up plenty of something that our guests seem to love - Dereliction and Decay (D and D) - which was just as well given the arid state of the landscape.
While I, too, love shooting D and D, it’s always underpinned by a sense of the personal, family or business tragedies and failures that have brought these things to pass. While I’m fond of the images, it’s hard to feel up-lifted by them. For that reason, perhaps, I like to inject a little distance into the pictures by how I process them, so that they look one step removed from everyday reality. Other people simply call this colour-grading!
Whenever we drive to the east, however, from granite to limestone, the mood of the landscape changes as if the sweet soils provide some sort of safety net. It’s somehow less hard-scrabble than on the acidic granite. The villages may appear a little shabby but in the wine country around Beaune, it’s skin deep. The per captial GDP of Côte d’Or department is half as much again as that of its western neighbour, La Nièvre, and that translates into generally higher living standards - though not always into building maintenance.
We made our usual visit to Apremont-sur-Allier, one of the Most Beautiful Villages of France with aRemarkable Garden. I’ve noticed the general level of technical ability steadily climb amongst our guests over the years and with it a willingness to explore all sorts of new creative avenues. So while the village and gardens provided the essential forms for our compositions, their treatment was anything but conventional and at least one guest has caught the “Kaleidoscopia” bug, big time. You know who you are, Deb! These pictures are derived from the tiling in one of the Garden’s follies.
After the group Retreat, we had the pleasure of hosting Jane from Quebec for a Chez-nous, before she joined another Light and Land group in Porto. Chez-nous are great for long-haul travellers looking to extend their stay in Europe beyond a week and to receive tuition (or just a HOLIDAY ! - Charlotte) focussed on their particular photographic or culinary interests. Normally we take couples or two friends but if there is a gap in our programme, single travellers are welcome too.
Since Jane had travelled with us to most of our normal late summer locations during the previous week, I was pretty motivated to pin down some new ones. One such was Paray-le-Monial, just an hour to the south of Les Saumais. With it’s warmly-coloured limestone buildings, fabulous basilica and picture-perfect canal, it feels quite different from our local patch and is sure to feature on future itineraries.
Finally, an observation about “French food”. In a country that rightly prides itself on its culinary heritage (with the exception, surely, of foie gras, andouillette andtête de veau), the prevalance of pizza is remarkable. I can’t talk about France beyond the department we live in and others we regularly visit, but here, pizza is everywhere. The clearest evidence of the creeping pizzafication of French cuisine is seen in the growing number of villages and towns where a franchisee maintains a pizza vending machine. Stocked with fresh ingredients each morning, a hungry person with €10 to hand is never more than 3 minutes away from a freshly baked pizza. Perhaps there is some fusty Parisian institute railing against this Italian coupde cuisine but if there is, it will be with the same futility as the Académie Française attempts to stamp-out use of “le weekend”. If it’s a choice between andouillette and pizza, the “I’s” (Italians) have it.
The wait is over…for the ebook version of our new book, Travels with my cake tins. We’re still passing the pitch around various agents but that could take long enough so in view of the number of requests we’ve had to see the book, we wanted to release it, albeit in electronic form. And that’s not all bad:
The pictures look better on screen than on a printed page (we didn’t skimp on the resolution)
It’s easier to find things than in a conventional book as you can use control (PC) or command (Mac) F to find what you’re looking for
On your TV screen the book is MUCH bigger than in printed form and…
…you can get it right now!
The book is a 200 spread (400 page) PDF, running to 63 000 words and including 211 photographs. €25. English language.
This is a bit more substantial than your average ebook and considerably more ambitious than our other ones. In it you will find the story of two people re-making their lives together in their forties through their collective creative endeavours. This is framed in the broader context of people’s relationship with nature and food in the countries we’ve worked in. And, of course, it is a treasure-trove of 66 of the recipes many of you have enjoyed on Retreat with us. It’s nothing if not ambitious in its scope.
And since it is relevant to you…there also are quite a few inspiring photographs. So we’ve been told by pre-viewers..
Will you support us by buying the ebook from our sister site, benvieart.eu ? The more we move, the stronger our case to put to agents. And the better you will eat 😉
Thank you!
Charlotte and Niall (co-authors, but mainly Charlotte)
While hunters in France don’t normally target chickens, they do use the things they can readily lay their hands on- such as mushrooms and white wine - to make a sauce to accompany the meat they have acquired during the hunt. So, the name is in honour of the sauce, not the poor old chicken. I serve it with creamy mashed potatoes to soak up the juices alongside carrots or greens to add some colour to the plate.
You will need:
Plain flour, 50g (13⁄4 oz)
Chicken legs, 4, large with thigh and drumstick
Unsalted butter, 80g (3 oz)
Olive oil, 90ml (3 fl oz)
One large onion, thinly sliced
Shallots, 2, thinly sliced
Garlic cloves, 2, thinly sliced
Porcini or chestnut mushrooms, 230g (8 oz), sliced
Good Cognac, 45ml (11⁄2 fl oz)
Good white wine, 60ml (2 fl oz)
Chicken stock, 500ml (171⁄2 fl oz)
Dijon mustard, 2 tsp
One boquet garni
Tarragon leaves, from 3 stems, stripped
Table salt
Black pepper
Crème frâiche, 75ml (21⁄2 fl oz)
And the making:
Preheat your oven to 180°C (160 ̊C fan) [350 ̊F/ 325 ̊F] Gas 4.
In a large pan, fry the chicken legs in a small amount of olive oil until they are browned, then set aside.
Wipe the pan down with kitchen towel while it is still warm, then put in the butter and sauté the onions, shallots and garlic in it on a medium heat.
Once they are soft, add the Cognac and wine and cook off the alcohol. This should happen within a couple of minutes. While it cooks off very quickly at high temperatures, you shouldn’t let the olive oil get too hot, nor should you risk burning the garlic. This requires close attention.
Once there are no obvious fumes, add the stock (180ml/ 6 fl oz), boquet garni and tarragon, then trans- fer the mix into a preheated, lidded casserole and put it in the oven for about 45 minutes.
At this point, you can remove the lid and give the dish another 15 minutes before stirring in the crème fraiche (75ml/ 21⁄2 fl oz). Fifteen minutes later, it will be ready to come out of the oven. Relish the scent of the steamy herbs as you remove the lid of the casserole.
Life beyond dawn and dusk and how to process it
For a long time, I’ve been interested to discover if it’s possible to create landscape photographs in the middle of the day that enchant the viewer as much as those taken at dawn and dusk. I’ve concluded that, for a whole lot of evolutionary, psychological and biochemical reasons, we probably can’t. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that they can’t enchant the viewer in different ways, such as through association and triggering memory. In our lives, relatively few of our defining or formative moments happen before a beautiful sunrise or at sunset. But to make mid-day pictures palatable, we need first to peel off the skin of snapshot-ery and make the pictures look less photographic. Deep shadows are places where nasty things lurk so they must be lightened. Bright highlights that are hard to look at should be dimmed.
Even then, shadows always have a tendency to blurt out “Photograph!” and I prefer to work when there are none. These are the sorts of days that, when you look at the sky, you have to squint a bit, even although there is no direct sun.
In their RAW state, these pictures look like bin fodder. And once you’ve lightened Shadows, suppressed Highlights and Whites and increased contrast in each of the colour channels in the Tone Curve, you might still feel the same way. The trick, though, is to change the Profile from its default (perhaps Adobe Colour) to something like Camera Flat, Adobe Standard or Camera Neutral - and see how the image transforms. At that point, you can restore as much or as little contrast and colour you want, but you will be starting from a point of relative neutrality - and the image will look a lot less like a photograph.
For the record, even people who live in a manoir or château have to hang out their washing. Relax; I’m not editing it out.
In this picture of Louise and Pierre-Armand’s château above Apremont-sur-Allier, the illusion of an illustration is complete and with it, the sense of a spring afternoon with clouds rolling quickly across the sky, blotting out the sun periodically. THAT I can relate to, and drift back into near-forgotten memories.
Our winter 2026 and
2027 Chez-nous brochures
What happened to the Spring 2027 brochure? Well, as it happens, our weeks are already booked out. Nevertheless, cancellations can happen so if you would like to register an interest in visiting us in the spring, please do so here.
Please click on a picture to see the brochure.
Do have a look at our 2027 Chez-nous brochures 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: Friluftsliv
What impoverished lives so many British children lead today. Not materially, necessarily (although, shamefully, over 4 million children are classed as living in poverty in the UK) but in respect of their freedom to play and explore without adult supervision; to enjoy unstructured time; to make their own discoveries. And it’s a tragedy because so many of the qualities we like admire in young people - resilience, imagination, initiative and drive - are being smothered at birth by a culture that is no longer willing to allow youngsters to make, and learn from, their mistakes; to become wise in their choices and, if necessary, wily in their defence. It’s a cohort of youth ill-equipped for a future of upheaval.
Not so in Norway where the friluftsliv - the outdoor life - is recognised as a constitutional right that is extended to children as much as it is to adults. And here enjoying it in 2004 is Vetle Dahle of Lauvsnes, then about ten. Twenty years later he and his cousin completed a 9 month adventure around Norway on foot, ski, by sail and boat. And these young men are certainly not alone in challenging themselves in this way. Norway, at least, has not bred the Viking spirit out of its youth.
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Our best wishes, Charlotte and Niall
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