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 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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France 2017

By shendyNo Comments
We went back to France for our summery holiday, after a slight aberration last year when we spent a few days in a caravan in Cornwall - any mention of that holiday now gets us both whistling the theme tune to Peter Kaye's Phoenix Nights, given the quality of the evening entertainment the caravan park laid on... We went back to a gite we've been to a couple of times before - it's nice, it's a good size for the two of us, it's quiet, it's very close to the local wine producer and it's got very clear views of the night sky. So here's a few different sets: Giverny On the way down through France, we stopped off at Giverny to visit the Monet gardens - we'd been a couple of times about 15 years ago now and thought it time for another visit. The last image is a little different - not taken at Giverny but fairly close by. Slightly inspired by the...
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Holiday Skies

By shendyNo Comments
Back from a lovely summer holiday in SW France, I've got a few photos to share. First up we have a collection around the theme of "sky" - sunsets, stars and a thunderstorm. Our gite was in the middle of nowhere and was quite high up, so we had a fantastic view of the sky at night - almost a horizon-to-horizon view of the milky way. I want/need a fast aperture wide angle lens as my 50mm f1.4 is nowhere near wide enough to do the sky justice, and my f2.8 24-70 lens isn't really fast enough. Then we have some night-time photos I took at the gite, with the aid of a torch and SWMBO. The third part is sunsets - not so much in the early days because there simply weren't any clouds (!), but some quite good ones later on. We had one thunderstorm - I was woken by lightning just before dawn one day and thundered out to get some photos. All a...
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