France 2022, there and back again

By shendyNo Comments
These are from the journey down to the gite and back - we always drive, and have started to spend a few days on the way. We could drive all the way to the gite in one go but there are other bits of France we want to visit and it breaks things up a bit - it's 400 miles from Caen/Ouistream to Bordeaux but it's autoroute the whole way and actually quite an easy drive. As an aside, we bought a "Bip n Go" device, which enables you to use "Telepeage" on the autoroutes, meaning we didn't need to use cards to pay the tolls - roll up to the Telepeage lane and the device will beep and the gates open. So easy, it made the journey a lot less stressful for SWMBO, who always had to manage the tolls given the tickets etc are always on the left. It cost something like €20 to buy and activate, and something...
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France 2022, at the gite

By shendy1 Comment
After missing two summer holidays in France, for obvious reasons, it was wonderful to go back in 2022. Given we had 2 years without a holiday, we chose to go back to somewhere we've been before - the same place as 2019, just north of Fumel. A large gite for two people, but quiet and comfortable. The Gite Gite sky, fisheye lens This set are general shots from around the gite - and of course it includes some photos of what we ate. Flowers etc Rose detail One of the main features of the gite is the sheer amount of flowers, mainly roses, around the place.There's also some of the other plants, and some butterflies. Skies Sunset clouds As usual, I spent quite a bit of time photographing the sky - we had some good skies for looking at the Milky Way, but we also had a couple of ISS passes.Some of these aren't as sharp as I would expect - the Fuji X-T4 is the first camera I've...
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France 2019

By shendyNo Comments
We'd been to the same gite in SW France for the last 4 holidays, but this time we booked late and it wasn't available. The one we went for this time was a bit more expensive, but absolutely lovely - and huge for the two of us, given that it can accommodate 16 people!The gite was booked via Halcyon Leisure - we've booked with them since 2000. We really didn't do very much at all - I took a couple of trips out to take photos in Fumel and at Chateau Bonaguil, but that was about it apart from going out to buy food and wine. The first set of photos are from the gite, with a couple from one of the trips out. The second set are images of the sky.Disappointingly we didn't have many good sunsets at all - just in the last half of the second week. Mind you, the main reason for the lack of them was because there...
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France 2018

By shendyNo Comments
We stayed in Bordeaux on the way down to our holiday in France - I had a Big Birthday shortly beforehand and fancied visiting some vineyards and doing a couple of tastings.We visited Chateaux Siran in Margaux, Chasse-Spleen in Moulis-en-Medoc and Bouscaut in Pessac-Leognan. The tours were interesting, particularly the Siran nuclear bunker... Once at the gite we actually did very little (which was lovely), but I still managed to take quite a lot of photos - we had the usual good sunsets, as well as one morning with a thick fog. There will be more images from the gite in the film update I'll be posting later. On the way home, we stopped off in the Loire for a Chateau visit - Azay-le-Rideau this time. And of course there was a decent selection of meals... As we'd been to this particular gite before, we knew that there would be plenty of opportunity for photographing the stars....
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Going Back to Film

By shendyNo Comments
Long and a bit image heavy... I was about to post something about getting back into taking and developing my own black and white film when I realised that I haven't actually posted anything at all about starting off with large format photography, which was where the whole film thing started - so this is going to be a long post with quite a few photos. This dates back to late 2014 when I heard about a Kickstarter project that was launching an affordable 5x4 large format camera, the Intrepid Camera Company. That's something I've thought about a few times over the last 20 years, but it's always been way out of my league - far too expensive. But suddenly this made it affordable, so I signed up. It took them quite a while to get production sorted and I didn't get my camera until mid-2016, and it's been a slow process getting used to it. I started with some cheap film,...
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