Author: Ian J Myers

I'm a half English, half Irish guy who has been in France for the last 30 years. I have a devouring passion for photography, be it digital or analogue. Photography is my escape, and what helps me feel whole. INFP

AI, Identity, and the Bridge That Doesn’t Exist

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I asked an AI to show me what ijmphotography.net looks like, and it gave me back a Parisian bridge that doesn’t exist in Nantes. But it got everything else right: the cat, the tea, the film camera, the books that shaped how I see. It nailed the feeling while getting the geography wrong. Which made me think about what it means to ask a machine to reflect who you are, and what gets lost in the translation.

What I Asked For

AI-generated portrait of bearded man wearing glasses and straw hat, Nantes France photographer
The person asking an AI to explain who they are. I always thought I had a better skin that this illustration lets on…

I gave it nothing. Just the domain name: ijmphotography.net. Except that wasn’t quite nothing. A domain name is a vector pointing to years of published work: hundreds of thousands of words, dozens of photographs, camera reviews, personal essays. The AI didn’t guess in a vacuum. It had access to the entire body of work I’d chosen to make public. My voice. My obsessions. The point is: I didn’t hand it components to arrange, but I did hand it a very specific signal.

What came back included everything I actually care about: the cat, the tea, the film camera, the books (Cartier-Bresson, Freeman, the entire visual canon), the light, the sense of someone who thinks carefully about seeing. All of it inferred from that signal.

What It Actually Made

It understood the assignment. The cat was there, alert in a way that suggested agency. The tea was steaming. The camera was right; not some generic film camera but rendered with the kind of specificity that suggested it had looked at actual rangefinder cameras. The books were there, their spines readable, the right titles. The light was cool and controlled, nothing warm or golden.

And then there was the bridge. A perfect Parisian arch over dark water, stone weathered by actual centuries. It was impossibly Parisian.

Nantes doesn’t have bridges like that. We have the Pont de la Madeleine, which is a lot of things: industrial, efficient, carrying traffic from the island to the mainland; but it isn’t that. It doesn’t have that romantic geometry. The AI had never seen Nantes. It had seen Paris. And when asked to imagine where a photographer lives, it defaulted to the thing it knew how to render as picture-perfect.

What Actually Happened

Here’s the thing that stopped me: the prompt was just “I would like you to create a pen drawing that represents ijmphotography.net.” That’s it. No details. No aesthetic direction.

And it came back with everything: the coherent visual identity of someone who thinks in photographs. All of that was inference. The AI had to synthesize an entire person from a signal.

That’s what’s remarkable about where we are with these systems now. I didn’t hand it components to arrange. I gave it a category—a domain, a name—and it generated a complete aesthetic representation. It looked at ijmphotography.net and thought: This must be someone who thinks deeply about seeing. Someone shaped by a particular visual tradition. Someone who probably drinks tea and owns a film camera and has read the books that matter.

It got that right. Unsettlingly right.

Then it added the Parisian bridge. And that’s where the inference becomes visible. The AI had to place this person somewhere, and the logic it applied was: Serious photographer. European visual tradition. Thinks about light and geometry. That’s Paris. It didn’t know Nantes. It didn’t have the data that the person actually is Nantes, that the grey light and industrial past and the edges that don’t fit the romance are the point. So it filled the gap with the most statistically likely answer.

The bridge isn’t a mistake. It’s the moment where you can see how the inference works. The AI understood enough to synthesize an accurate aesthetic, but not enough to know that the specificity—the actual geography, the actual city—was part of what makes that aesthetic mean something. It knew what you looked at. It didn’t know where you looked from.

What Gets Lost in Translation

The weird part is how much the mistake tells me about myself. Because I would never have put Nantes in that image on my own. I would have defaulted to Paris too, probably. There’s something embarrassing about that gap: what I actually am (someone who photographs in Nantes, shaped by this specific grey city) versus what the visual language of my influences suggests I should be (someone drawn to the romance of European capitals).

The AI was doing what all of us do: trying to shorthand who we are by reaching for references that other people already understand. It works, most of the time. But it costs something. The specificity of Nantes: the industrial past, the way the light sits differently here, the edges of it that don’t fit romantic narratives; that becomes invisible. The machine sees the category you belong to and fills in with category defaults.

The Bridge and the Rest

I’ll probably use the image anyway. Not because it’s perfect, but because the flaw is more interesting than perfection would have been. The bridge that doesn’t exist is, in a weird way, more honest than an image of an actual Nantes bridge would have been. It shows the gap between how the world sees you and who you actually are: between what your influences suggest you should look like and what you actually look like.

And maybe that’s the point of asking an AI to show you yourself in the first place. Not to get an accurate portrait, but to see the particular ways you don’t add up. To notice where the machine defaults to assumption because it doesn’t have the specific data. To see yourself through the gap.

Everything essential remained. It’s just rendered in front of a bridge from another city, and somehow that’s more true than geography would have been.

The Uncanny Part

But here’s what I can’t shake: the AI inferred all of this from a signal. Well enough that I recognized myself in something made by a machine that has never seen me, never thought about photography, never sat with tea and a camera trying to understand how to see.

It got the shape of who I am right. It just can’t understand what that shape means. It saw the pattern and filled in the category defaults. And because the pattern was sophisticated enough, and the defaults were sophisticated enough, it worked. It looked like understanding.

That’s what’s uncanny. Not that the AI got it wrong. That it got it right by accident. That it can synthesize an identity without any capacity to comprehend identity.

The machine understands enough to be useful and unsettling in equal measure. It reads you well enough that you believe it knows you. Then you realize it doesn’t know anything at all. It just knows how to look like it knows.

It knew what I looked at.

It just didn’t know where I was looking from.

A Fan Letter to Monochromia

Posted on Posted in Black and White Photography, France, photography philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

I want to talk about a blog I really like. It posts beautiful black and white photographs, one at a time, with barely a word of explanation. The photos come from all over the world — a rainy Chicago waterfront, a Nubian village on the banks of the Nile, a Roman basilica glowing with chandeliers, the streets of Washington D.C. — but they share a certain quality. They don’t try to explain themselves. They just sit there and let you look.

The blog is called Monochromia, and I have the privilege of being one of its guest contributors. I want to make that clear upfront: this is not my project. But it’s one I admire enough to write a fan letter about.

What Monochromia is

Monochromia is a collective photography blog. A community of photographers from around the world each post one image at a time — black and white, minimal words, maximum image. There’s no theme beyond the monochrome constraint. The result is something genuinely surprising: a feed that moves from a marble sculpture in a Smithsonian museum to a woman in a doorway on the Nile without a moment’s awkwardness. The common language is light and shadow, and it turns out that’s enough.

Nubian woman in a doorway, Upper Egypt, Nikon Zf
Silent Observations — a Nubian village on the Nile, Upper Egypt. Nikon Zf, 200mm. By Marcus Puschmann / Streets of Nuremberg. On Monochromia.

The photographers

What strikes me most is the range of voices. Marcus Puschmann, who blogs at Streets of Nuremberg, shoots documentary street photography on a Nikon Zf, with a sensitivity to available light that makes his portraits feel utterly unposed. The Northern Visions Media photographer shoots everywhere from Chicago waterfronts to wherever the day takes him, and thinks nothing of swapping his Canon 5D for an iPhone when the rain makes the decision for him — a reminder that the eye matters more than the tool. Then there are contributors who bring an entirely different sensibility: one recent post featured a marble sculpture of Lady Macbeth at the Smithsonian, shot on a Nikon Z8, with a caption that read like a short essay. Another showed the interior of a Roman basilica lit up for a wedding, processed as HDR, every column and chandelier rendered in luminous grey. And Charly Senall at charlysenall.wordpress.com brings a quieter, more contemplative eye — seascapes and landscapes where the absence of colour is the whole point.

Chicago waterfront on a rainy day, iPhone 16 Pro
Tethered — Chicago waterfront on a rainy day. iPhone 16 Pro. By Northern Visions Media. On Monochromia.

What the constraint does

Every photographer on Monochromia has made the same fundamental decision: to remove colour from the conversation. That sounds simple, but it changes everything. Colour is generous with information — it tells you the time of day, the season, roughly where in the world you are, whether the light is artificial or natural. Strip it away and what’s left is shape, tone, texture, and the relationship between them. The viewer has to do more work. They have to actually look.

The minimal-text policy does the same thing from a different angle. Most photography online arrives inside a story — a caption, a backstory, a geotag, a mood. Monochromia offers almost none of that. Just the image and maybe a line or two. Which means the photograph either stands on its own or it doesn’t. That’s a much harder test than most of us put our own work through.

Lady Macbeth marble sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Out, Damnet Spot — Lady Macbeth by Elisabet Ney, 1905. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Nikon Z8, 135mm. On Monochromia.

My small corner of it

I contribute the occasional image from France — film photographs mostly, from the Nikon FE or the Pentax ME Super, sometimes digital work from the Canon 6D Mark II. My most recent post was shot inside Nantes Cathedral, one of the first times I’d been back inside since the 2019 fire. It’s a small contribution to a large and genuinely international conversation, and I’m glad to be part of it.

What Monochromia has done for me personally is make me more honest about my own work. Here on IJM Photography, a good story can carry a weaker image. On Monochromia, there is no story — just the photograph. If it holds, it holds. If it doesn’t, that’s useful information too.

Nantes Cathedral interior, Nikon FE, Ilford HP5+
Nantes Cathedral — Nikon FE, Ilford HP5+. One of my first shots inside since the 2019 fire. On Monochromia.

Go and have a look

If you enjoy black and white photography — whether you shoot it yourself or just appreciate it — Monochromia is worth bookmarking. It posts multiple times a week, the standard is consistently high, and the range of subjects and styles means there’s always something unexpected. It’s a good reminder that monochrome isn’t a retro affectation or a post-processing shortcut. It’s a distinct way of seeing the world, and there are a lot of people around the world who see it that way.

monochromia.blog

A Day in Paris with My Daughter: The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and 127 Floors

Posted on Posted in Black and White Photography, Family Life, France, Paris, Travel photographyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

WordPress has suggested I republish this, and for once I agree with an algorithm. This article first appeared on July 11, 2020, six years ago today. The world was still trying to work out what to do with itself in the aftermath of the first lockdown, and we were trying to work out what to do with a cancelled trip to Hull.

The solution, as it turned out, was Paris. My daughter Kate was ten years old, on crutches, armed with opinions about Greek mythology and strong feelings about Marks and Spencer. I had a walking stick, two cameras, and the quiet delusion that I might, at some point, get a shot worthy of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Louvre did not disappoint either of us. The 127 floors on my step counter very nearly did.

She is sixteen now. She still loves Paris. I still have the walking stick, though the arthritis and I have reached something of a truce. I have no idea if she remembers the Mona Lisa, or the painting of Napoleon crowning his bride, or Louis XIV looking improbably good in tights. But I know she remembers the day. That, I think, was the point.

Paris!

On the Way Home

Posted on Posted in France, Landscape Photography, Travel photography, VendéeTagged , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

There is a particular skill in noticing things on a drive and then actually stopping to do something about them. I have this skill approximately twice a year, if conditions are right and there is a camera on the passenger seat.

My daughter needed dropping off. Her friend too. They were going to watch someone play something somewhere in the north of the Vendée: I did not ask many questions, which is apparently the correct posture at this stage of parenting. I dropped them off, pointed the car back towards home, and drove past the same fields I had been quietly registering for weeks.

I had first noticed them whilst out with my son: flat, wide, open, the kind of agricultural landscape you pass through on the way to somewhere else. The north of the Vendée is not the Vendée most people expect. There are no bocage hedgerows here, no hills doing anything dramatic. It is cereal crops and telegraph poles and sky, and in the right light it holds very still, as if it knows something you don’t.

Each time I had driven through it I had thought: I should stop here. Each time, I had not stopped.

This time the X-T2 was on the passenger seat with the Helios 44-2 on the front of it. The Helios is a Soviet-era 58mm lens with a reputation for doing interesting things with light that is not pointed directly at it: a slight warmth, a softness at the edges, a quality that sits somewhere between documentation and memory. It is not the lens you reach for when precision is the priority. It is the lens you reach for when you are not entirely sure what you want but you suspect something is there.

I pulled over. I was in the field for under half an hour.

The wheat was at that transitional point between green and gold: not yet fully dried through, some stalks still holding their earlier colour while others had already given up on it. The light was coming in low and flat from the west, doing what late evening light in June does when it decides to cooperate; which is to say, it was doing most of the work for me.

What I kept returning to were the telegraph poles. There is one in particular that appears in several of the frames: a single upright in an otherwise uninterrupted field, placed there at some point for entirely practical reasons by someone who was not thinking about photographs. You notice the geometry of it. The wires pulling away at angles. The fact that the land is so flat and the sky is so blank that the pole reads almost as a deliberate placement; a decision rather than an accident.

I spent some time at the field edges, where the cultivated gives way to the accidental. The daisies there were doing well. They grow in at the margins of the wheat, small and white and backlit, and they are the kind of foreground detail that would look arranged if you had arranged it. I shot some of them flat to the ground, the X-T2’s tilting screen earning its keep in a way that my knees were grateful for.

There is a young corn seedling in one of the frames: a single green plant in dry, pale earth, with a long row of its identical companions stretching away behind it into blur. I cannot give you a strong editorial reason for having taken that photograph. I took it anyway. Sometimes the thing that catches the eye simply catches the eye, and you either commit to it or you don’t.

The last frames were the closest: individual wheat ears, the small bristles of grain, the way the Helios renders the background when you are that close. There is a version of that shot that is technically not what I would call an achievement. There is another version where the light is doing something I did not entirely plan and the grain looks less like grain and more like the idea of it.

I prefer the second version, which is convenient because that is the one I came home with.

I was back before dark. My daughter was collected later, still pleasantly vague about the exact nature of what she had watched.

Half an hour in a field in the north of the Vendée. I should probably stop more often.

Golden wheat field at sunset with lone telegraph pole, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France
Wheat field with distant tree line and telegraph poles in golden evening light, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée
Large square hay bale against dark trees with wildflowers in foreground, golden hour, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2 north Vendée
Backlit white daisies at wheat field edge, hay bale blurred in background, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée
Wild daisies and grass in golden evening light with wheat field behind, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France
Wide wheat field at golden hour with distant farmhouse and tree line, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée France
Single young corn seedling in dry pale earth with row of plants blurred behind, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée
Wheat field in portrait orientation with blurred tree line behind, Helios 44-2 bokeh, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée
Close-up wheat ears in golden backlit evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2 58mm, north Vendée France
Wheat ears filling frame in warm amber evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France June 2026
Close detail of wheat ears in warm evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France
Wheat stalks at field edge in golden evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée
Single wheat ear in sharp focus with swirly Helios 44-2 bokeh background, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France
Green roadside grass in warm golden side-lighting at field edge, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France
Narrow country lane with hedgerows and golden field, warm painterly tones, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée
Wild daisies in foreground with golden wheat field and tree line behind, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France
Wide wheat field with telegraph pole under hazy amber sky, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France
Vast flat wheat field at dusk with telegraph pole and power lines under peach sky, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée

Nantes, the green line

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Seven years ago today, Killian and I followed a painted green line through Nantes for twelve kilometres. In thirty-six-degree heat. With a Canon 6D Mark II and no particular plan other than cheesecake at Sugar Blue Café, which was, if I’m honest, probably the whole plan.

The line belongs to Le Voyage à Nantes, the city’s annual art festival. They paint it on the ground so you don’t get lost. You follow it. You stop when something interests you. We stopped for cheesecake, obviously, and then for a lengthy digression into the history of General Cambronne: a man who, when asked to surrender to the British at Waterloo, may or may not have replied with one very short word that has since been immortalised as le mot de Cambronne. Right back on track now.

The photographs are from the archives: the 16-35mm, the summer light, and a city that always has something worth slowing down for.

Nantes, the Green Line!

IJM on the Streets — Nantes: The Book

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Empty Cafés Richard espresso cup on a café table in Nantes — Nikon FE, Rollei RPX 400
The thesis — Nikon FE, Rollei RPX 400, Nantes, February 2026

I have written a book. These things happen.

It started, as most of my trouble does, with sitting down. Ten years of parking at the Feydeau car park, walking into town not especially fast, finding a bench or a terrace table or a warm rock at the Jardin Extraordinaire, and staying there while the city got on with its afternoon. Somewhere along the way I noticed that this was not a failure to do street photography properly. It was the method. The book makes the argument at full length: the best street photographs come not from hunting but from inhabiting. Find the spot. Sit down. Let the place come to you.

IJM on the Streets — Nantes is nine chapters and a decade of film. The Bouffay at night on HP5+, squinting and hoping at 1/15th of a second. The empty Cafés Richard espresso cup that turned out to be the whole thesis. The café above the weir at the Chaussée des Moines, where the cake had absolutely nothing to do with how fondly I remember the day, or so I keep telling myself. Two seasons at the Jardin Extraordinaire. The year I refused to photograph the cathedral until the banners came down. And the Île de Nantes in 2016, with Kate, aged seven, and her Olympus Trip 35 — her photos turned out better than just fine, and it is all on record now.

Regular readers will recognise some of these days. The blog posts were the field notes; the book is what they were quietly adding up to. It is also, I should warn you, a book that contains opinions about coffee, cake, comfortable shoes, and why 36 frames are a pair of spectacles rather than a constraint. Everything was shot on film — HP5+, Pan 100, Kentmere 400, RPX 400, APX 100 — and developed in my kitchen, and the missed focus stayed in where it earned its place. The candles in the cathedral are slightly blurred. They are staying that way.

The book is available now as a PDF ebook in the shop, for the price of a few good espressos. Thirty-odd black and white photographs, ten years, one city. Free to read in any café you like.

On est bien là.

P.S. Kate has been informed that she features prominently. She has requested royalties. Negotiations continue over tea.

Why I wrote the book

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People ask me, fairly regularly, where to start with film photography. Not which camera to buy — that question answers itself quickly enough — but how to actually think about it. How to stop guessing and start seeing. How to trust the process when you can’t see the results for a week.

For a long time I answered this in individual emails. Then in blog posts. Then in longer blog posts. Then in a series of posts that kept referring back to each other until I realised I wasn’t writing separate pieces at all — I was writing one thing, slowly, over several years.

That thing is now a book.

Photography from the Heart covers the ground I wish someone had covered for me when I started. Not the mechanics — the mechanics are in every manual ever printed. The thinking. How to use the exposure triangle as a creative tool rather than a technical hurdle. How to develop your own film without ruining it. How to decide what to photograph in the first place, and why that question matters more than any of the technical ones.

I’ve been shooting since the mid-1980s. I’ve used cameras that cost nothing and cameras that cost more than they should. I’ve developed film in darkrooms and my bathroom. I’ve taken photographs I’m proud of and a great many more that taught me something. This book is the distillation of all of that — not as a record of my career, but as a guide I would have found genuinely useful at the start.

It’s written the way I write here: plainly, without pretension, with the assumption that you are serious about what you’re doing and don’t need to be talked down to.

You can get it two ways. Buy it directly for 12€ — no email required, no subscription, just the book. Or get it free in exchange for your email address, and I’ll send it to you directly.

Either way, I hope it’s useful.

— Ian

Get the book

Six years

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This blog started in 2019. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I had photographs I wanted to write about, and thoughts about photography I wanted to test against actual words, and a vague sense that putting things down in public might make me take them more seriously.

Seven years later — over three hundred posts in — I still can’t fully explain what it is. It’s not a tutorial site, though I write about technique sometimes. It’s not a portfolio, though the photographs are here. It’s more like a notebook that got out of hand. A record of what I noticed, what I got wrong, what surprised me.

The Vendée. Nantes. A forest I keep going back to. An orchestra I’ve been photographing for three years. Cameras I’ve loved and one or two I haven’t. A book, eventually. Wrong turns that turned out to be the point.

I’m still here, still writing, still developing my own film in the kitchen. If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you — genuinely. If you’ve just found this place, the best place to start is here.

If you’d like to follow along, you can do that below. One post at a time, when it’s ready.

— Ian

Montjean-sur-Loire — The Wrong Road, the Right Place

Posted on Posted in Black and White Photography, Café Culture, France, Landscape Photography, Reportage, Street Photography, Travel photographyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Gear: Canon EOS 6D Mark II | 16–35mm | 24–70mm | 70–300mm | CPL filter

A Saturday afternoon in June. Montjean-sur-Loire. I was aiming for the suspension bridge in Ancenis. I missed it, found myself heading towards Angers, spotted a sign for the Loire Valley, and followed it on a whim. The Canon 6D Mark II was on the seat beside me. Sometimes that’s all you need.

I had an idea, to get in my car and drive and do some photography. It was an attempt to escape my family. I love them dearly, but sometimes you need a break. So I broke out and got in the car with my camera. Did I have any idea on where I was going? Absolutely not! As I passed the junctions I crossed out the ideas in my head; First Clisson, then Nantes, oh bugger this was going to be long. I remember seeing a photo of the suspension bridge in Ancenis and thought that could do me nicely. It would have done but I didn’t see it and then I found myself on the road to Angers. I could do that… Little did I know that I wouldn’t get there… Ah well. It wouldn’t be the first time. I saw a sign saying the road that follows the Loire Valley. I thought I’d give it a go. I ended up in a place called Montjean sur Loire. You’re not going to believe this, but the huge river I could see was wider even than the Humber, or so it seemed. I had once seen the Loire before as a boy and later as a grown man, but never like this. As a boy it had been a place we drove along whilst going to the Vendée in 1980. As a man I had been next to the Loire and saw it as this massive river meandering along before it got to Nantes, and then went towards St Nazaire. I had read about Huckleberry Finn and his journey along the river. That’s the feeling I had when I parked up on the quayside, minus Mark Twain. There were massive sand banks and islands on the river. The water was so clear, and I saw a fish jumping. I also saw the fry swimming under the boats. I got out of the car and started looking for compositions. After exploring the quayside I decided it was time for a beer. It’s beer o’clock somewhere in the world. I had a 0% beer. What a wonderful idea. There was a poster for a brass band concert for the 4th and 5th of July and it would be performed by the band that Hervé tried to get me interested in… A reason to go back? I found a typical street photography shot. Using the bars of the terrasse to frame my subject.

I looked at the bridge and tried to find a half decent composition. So I did the usual thing. Going around the sides of the bridge, looking towards where I had come from when arriving in town. “Always look behind you.” I wanted the geometry of the bridge and played with the shapes it provided. I wasn’t going to get the dramatic shadows. By the time I got back to the car, I was ready to go home. Back in the car, music on and through the Mauges towards Cholet then, back into Vendée. It was a long afternoon but a good one.

Two traditional Loire flat-bottomed boats moored on sandy bank, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Two Loire flat-bottomed boats on river with suspension bridge behind, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Loire traditional flat-bottomed boat close-up at water's edge with bridge behind, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II
Looking down into traditional Loire flat-bottomed boat interior, wooden planks and rope, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II
Traditional Loire boat in foreground with dramatic cloud sky and river beyond, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Two traditional Loire boats on river with Montjean suspension bridge background, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Traditional Loire sailing boat Belle Anguille moored alone on still river, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Montjean-sur-Loire suspension bridge reflected in still Loire river water, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Hand-painted nameplate reading Belle Anguille on wooden Loire boat hull, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Wide Loire river panorama at low water with boats and sandy beach, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Three metal flying tern sculptures on poles against sky with Loire river and boat behind, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II
White hollyhock flower in foreground with suspension bridge and Loire river blurred behind, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Looking along Montjean-sur-Loire suspension bridge roadway toward second pylon, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Montjean-sur-Loire suspension bridge from quay with underwater mural on wall and Loire beyond, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Underwater scene mural on quay wall beneath Montjean suspension bridge with cobblestones foreground, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
British red telephone box converted to book exchange, man looking at Loire and bridge beyond, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II
Montjean-sur-Loire suspension bridge over Loire river with dramatic cloud sky, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm CPL filter
Festival de Brass Band concert poster for 4th and 5th July 2026, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm
Man at café terrasse framed through metal bars with bridge visible behind, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm
House martin mud nests under building cornice eaves, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Rusted curved iron bracket on stone quay wall against pale sky, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Bière pression Jupiler sign in café window with photographer reflection, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm
Weathered carved stone fish sculpture on quayside with Loire river behind, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Iron mooring ring set in granite quayside stone with shadow, Montjean-sur-Loire, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm

Saints, Shadows and Brass: An Evening at the Festival Saint Donatien

Posted on Posted in Music, Nantes Photography, Reportage, Street PhotographyTagged , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

It was a Friday in May. I received a Facebook message from an old friend. Well, I mean, not ancient, but somebody I have known for 15 years. He was my Director of Music when I played for the Wind Band in Cholet. We have both moved on since then, but still regularly keep in touch. I actually took some photos for him and for his Brass Quintet Arabesque, and even stood in for my old horn teacher playing Christmas carols one year. The rotundness of me and the big white beard had nothing to do with it.

Anyway, he messaged me. Right back on track now. He asked if I would like to go and listen to them play in Nantes. I of course said yes, and told my wife that I would be out. Fortunately I was given permission by “she who must be obeyed.”

His name is Hervé Dubois, tuba player, conductor, and a very good friend. And if you can’t take photos for a friend, then why even bother. I have a lot to thank him for. Not only is he a good friend, but it was through him and Quintet Arabesque that my photography first found a purpose beyond pointing a camera at things and hoping for the best. I did a full photoshoot for them at a concert in Guérande, and to my genuine surprise, those images ended up on the sleeve of their CD. Which means somewhere out there, pressed onto a disc, is proof that I occasionally do something right. More than that, Arabesque gave me a real taste for documenting music: not performing it, but being inside it with a camera. If you want to know more about Hervé, I wrote a portrait piece about him a few years back, and there is also The American Concert if you want the full picture of my ongoing relationship with this particular brass quintet.

I arrived early, as I tend to when I have a camera with me. Nantes was still in afternoon light, and the neighbourhood around the Basilique Saint-Donatien has exactly the kind of streets that reward patience: old stone, heavy shadows, ironwork that throws patterns across walls when the sun catches it at the right angle.

I have been trying something deliberately different with my photography lately. Rather than documenting what is in front of me, I have been looking for what the light is doing. The way shadow doubles the shape of a wrought iron gate on the stone behind it. The texture of centuries-old masonry caught in raking sunlight, where every crack and grain becomes its own small landscape. A wooden door under a fan-shaped iron canopy, lit just enough to pull it out of the surrounding dark. The photographs almost make themselves when you start looking that way; you just have to be in the right place and wait for the light to do its work.

By the time I made my way to the basilica, the sun was lower and the facade was glowing. The equestrian statue out front stood in silhouette against it, which felt appropriately dramatic for a saint’s festival.

Inside, the space had already been transformed. The organisers had bathed the apse in deep red stage lighting, and against the white stone of the neo-Gothic vaulting, the effect was extraordinary: ancient and modern at once, sacred and theatrical. The stained glass windows in the choir, normally gentle with colour, became something stranger under that wash of red.

The programme for the Festival Saint Donatien was built around the relationship between music and place. Quintet Arabesque were performing alongside the cathedral organist and, this time around, a choir as well. The idea was simple and quietly brilliant: drone footage of the basilica, filmed from outside and above, played on a large screen while the music filled the interior beneath. You could see the building from the sky while sitting inside it. Something about that shift in perspective changed the way you heard the music, and the way you felt the space around you.

We were asked not to applaud between pieces, and to let the whole evening unfold as a kind of meditation. It was the right call. In a space like that, with light and music working together at that level, the silence between movements became part of the performance. You sat with it. The acoustics of the stone carried each note long after it had been played, and for a while you stopped thinking about anything at all.

I had my camera with me, as I always do, and I tried to photograph what I was seeing. The difficulty, and the interest, was that the light inside was almost entirely the red of the stage wash and the cool blue filtering through the high windows. There was very little middle ground, and no safety net. You either committed to what was in front of you or you put the camera down. I chose to commit, and some of the results are not what I would call technically accomplished. But a few of them feel like the room actually felt.

Afterwards, the great red doors opened onto the square, and the audience spilled back out into the evening. I stood for a moment in the doorway looking back: the dark interior, the rows of empty pews, the faint glow of the apse still red behind the screen. Then I turned around, and there was the city again.

The streets were quiet on the walk back to the car. Nantes at night has a different quality to it: the stone buildings hold the warmth of the day, and the streetlights pool in places that the sun never quite reaches. I kept shooting. That is the thing about looking for light rather than subjects; the light does not stop being interesting just because the concert has ended.

Hervé and I ended up in a pub, as these evenings generally do. Two old friends catching up in person, which is a very different thing from a Facebook message, and a much better one. The evening had started with a notification on a screen and ended somewhere warmer and louder, with proper conversation that goes sideways in the best possible way. Full circle, really.

On the way back to the car, I stopped in the street and looked up. The twin towers of the basilica were still lit up in red against the black sky, visible above the rooftops from two streets away. It looked less like a church and more like something you might dream.

I took a photograph. Of course I did. Prints from Nantes are available in the IJM Photography shop.

Stone building with red-trimmed gabled dormer and shutters against blue sky, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Green ornate iron gate casting scrollwork shadow on old stone wall in raking sunlight, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Dark stone building corner with white arched doorway and green iron railing, deep shadows, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Close-up of green iron railing against rough textured stone wall in warm raking light, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Two cream-coloured French houses with patterned chimneys and tree shadow on warm wall, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Warm-lit wooden double door numbered 13 beneath a wheel-spoke iron canopy in dramatic low light, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Wooden door with iron security gate and stone steps framed through an arched entrance with topiary urn, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Basilique Saint-Donatien seen from narrow side street with parked cars and summer trees, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Peeling white and pale blue wooden shutters open on tall building façade with carved stonework, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Festival Saint Donatien poster advertising La Basilique Vue du Ciel concert with Quintet Arabesque, Nantes 22 May 2026
Neo-Gothic façade of Basilique Saint-Donatien with equestrian statue in warm evening light, Fujifilm X100F 23mm, Nantes
Interior nave of Basilique Saint-Donatien with stone vaulting, wooden pews and projection screen at altar end, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Illustrated Saint Donatien banner hanging from a pillar in basilica interior with deep red uplighting, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Looking up at triforium arches and stained glass windows in red and blue low light, Fujifilm X100F, Basilique Saint-Donatien Nantes
Apse of Basilique Saint-Donatien bathed in deep red stage lighting with stained glass choir windows, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Wide view of red-lit apse and choir of Basilique Saint-Donatien during Festival Saint Donatien, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Red-lit basilica apse with Festival Saint Donatien projection screen showing drone footage, audience in foreground, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Full nave of Basilique Saint-Donatien with Quintet Arabesque performing under red stage lighting, Festival Saint Donatien, Fujifilm X100F
View from inside Basilique Saint-Donatien through open red doors to the lit square and equestrian statue beyond, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Empty night street in Nantes with single streetlamp illuminating stone building facade, Fujifilm X100F 23mm
Silhouetted figure on night street lit by car headlights and streetlamps near Basilique Saint-Donatien, Fujifilm X100F, Nantes
Twin towers of Basilique Saint-Donatien lit deep red against black night sky above Nantes street, Fujifilm X100F 23mm

Clisson — A Guilty Pleasure

Posted on Posted in Camera reviews, photography philosophy, Reportage, Street Photography, Travel photographyTagged , , , , 1 Comment

Gear: Canon EOS 6D Mark II | 16–35mm | 24–70mm | 70–300mm | CPL filter

A warm Wednesday in May. Clisson. Back in April I was here with the EOS 500 and wrote that I was missing the Canon 6D Mark II. Well.

I’ve been here before, of course. You don’t live in this part of France and not find yourself back in Clisson every so often. The medieval castle, the weirs, the old bridge with its stone cross, the Italian terraces creeping up the hillside. It has a slightly unreal quality, like someone has taken a corner of Tuscany and dropped it quietly into the Loire-Atlantique. The Sèvre Nantaise was running high and brown today — all that recent rain — which made the weirs more dramatic than usual, churning white water over the stone steps.

I came down through the town from the castle side. The bunting was up across the streets near the main square, yellow and red triangles strung between the buildings, flapping gently. A woman on a bicycle was navigating the cobblestones with considerable confidence. Two men were eating lunch outside on a terrace — “Bon appétit, messieurs” — and they looked up and smiled. These small things matter. The panama hat was on. I was in no hurry.

The juice bar near the bridge foot, Juste un Jus, had the castle tower rising directly behind it like a film set. I stood there for a moment with the 24–70mm and took the shot. Sometimes Clisson just hands you a composition.

Crossing the Pont Saint-Antoine, I stopped at the stone cross near the midpoint. It’s a modest thing really, weathered and lichen-covered, but the view it frames looking back toward the château is extraordinary. The cobblestones, the parapet, the ruined towers against the sky. I took several frames here and kept coming back to it. One of those spots where you don’t quite want to leave.

Below the bridge on the town side, a woman was standing at the water’s edge looking up at the arches. She wasn’t posing. She was just there, in her own thoughts, which made the photograph. Further along the bank, white calla lilies were growing wild in a tangle of green at the river’s edge, the old stone arch just visible beyond them. The 70–300mm earns its weight on a day like this.

The path along the Sèvre heading away from town is lush in May. The linden trees were in blossom, hanging overhead in the dappled shade. Yellow wildflowers were growing right down to the waterline, their stems reflected in the brown moving water. I don’t know the name of every plant I photograph. Sometimes it doesn’t matter.

On the way back through the streets I noticed a small yellow letterbox set into the wall. “POSTES — CLISSON.” It seemed like a reasonable way to end the afternoon.

On était bien là. Prints from Clisson are available in the IJM Photography shop.

Article notes

On the Canon 6D Mark II in 2026: Yes, it was released in 2017. Yes, Canon has long since moved on to the EOS R series. No, I don’t particularly care.

I came to Clisson knowing this outing would feel different. I wanted to test that honestly: same town, same kind of light, a familiar subject, but a different tool. And it does get the job done. It gets the job done very well. But did I feel like I was cheating? In some respects, yes.

The 6D Mark II is in many ways point and shoot. The autofocus makes decisions quickly and accurately. The image stabilisation in the lenses gives you frames you would simply never achieve on film — handheld shots at slower shutter speeds that come out clean, details in low-contrast shade that hold together. You don’t have to count frames or worry about whether a scene is worth the cost of the shot. You can try things freely. And yet I was shooting mindfully, the same way I would with film. Pausing. Looking. Deciding before pressing the shutter rather than after. The camera was doing more of the mechanical work, but the intention was the same.

Which is where the imposter syndrome creeps in.

Do I deserve the results? The images are good because the light was good and the composition was considered and the 6D Mark II’s full-frame sensor handled everything it was asked to handle. But some small part of me wonders how much of that I can genuinely claim. With the EOS 500 you earn each frame by committing to it. You have thirty-six shots. No preview. No second chance. The discipline is built in. With digital, the discipline has to come from you, and it is easier to let it slip without noticing.

The 16–35mm was a deliberate experiment. I knew it would show me Clisson differently. Getting low near the castle, letting the wide end exaggerate the height of the towers, using the diagonal of the outer wall as a lead-in. That is something the EOS 500 and a fixed 24mm simply cannot do. I shot on aperture priority for most of the day, which kept me thinking about depth of field rather than handing everything over to the camera. It felt like the right balance: let the 6D Mark II handle the exposure arithmetic, but keep the creative decisions in hand. For the 70–300mm I switched to shutter priority. At that focal length you need to know the shutter speed is fast enough to keep things sharp, particularly with the river moving, people on the bridge, wildflowers shifting in any breeze. The compression and selective focus that lens gives you — the yellow wildflowers sharp against the blurred water behind them — only works if the shutter is doing its job. These are results I would never get on film. The workhorse earns its place.

The CPL filter helped throughout. It deepened that May sky, cut the glare off the weir, brought the riverbank green back from what the flat midday sun was trying to do to it. One of those practical things you stop noticing until you see what the images look like without one.

The colours are perhaps the starkest difference from film — and I should say, the most obvious one, given that the AGFA APX 100 I use in the EOS 500 is a black and white negative film. There is no colour to compare. The 6D Mark II gives you the full scene: the terracotta of the buildings, the vivid green of the May riverbank, the blue the CPL filter pulls out of the sky above the castle towers. AGFA APX 100 gives you grain, tone, contrast, texture. A different kind of truth about the same place. Neither is more correct. That is exactly why it is worth doing both.

Then there is the edit. The 16 images I kept were processed with minimal adjustment and a single Portra preset — a film emulation based on Kodak Portra colour negative film. Warm lifted shadows, a slight vignette, teal-shifted blues. The result is that these digital files, shot on a nine-year-old DSLR to see what digital could do that film cannot, have been processed to look as much like film as possible. I did not plan that irony. But there it is.

One concrete number from the day: 123 frames, 16 strong images. A 13% hit rate. On a roll of 36 with the EOS 500 I would expect to come back with 4 or 5 solid keepers — roughly the same proportion. The digital camera gave me more attempts, more flexibility, no cost per frame. The ratio stayed almost identical. That is either reassuring or unsettling depending on your mood. It suggests the extra frames didn’t make me careless. It also suggests that 36 frames of discipline might have found those 16 anyway.

But yes. Guilty pleasure. I know it is just a tool, and a good one. I know the results come from the eye as much as the camera. I know all the rational arguments. And I will keep making them to myself, probably for longer than I should, every time I reach for it instead of the film bag.

Previous Clisson outings: 7th April 2026 with the EOS 500 and 25th January 2026 with the Nikon FE.

Château de Clisson towers seen from below against deep blue May sky, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm CPL filter
Château de Clisson keep from the rocky base
Pont Saint-Antoine bridge and weir on the Sèvre Nantaise, Clisson town buildings beyond, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Pont Saint-Antoine Clisson from the stone riverbank, weir foreground and church tower beyond, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm Caption: Clisson from the bank
Two people sitting on stone bridge parapet in Clisson, backs to camera, green May trees beyond, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
View along the Sèvre Nantaise from Pont Saint-Antoine, Clisson church tower and riverside houses in lush May green, Canon 6D Mark II
Stone cross on Pont Saint-Antoine with Château de Clisson in background, cobblestone bridge leading to medieval towers, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Juste un Jus juice bar in Clisson with medieval castle tower rising behind it, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm
Clisson street with yellow and red bunting, cyclist on cobblestones, terracotta building and mural, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Yellow POSTES letterbox set into dark green wall stamped CLISSON, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm Loire-Atlantique
White calla lilies growing wild at edge of Sèvre Nantaise, ivy-covered stone arch beyond, Clisson, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Linden tree blossom hanging over riverside path along the Sèvre Nantaise in May, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm Clisson
Yellow wildflowers sharp against blurred brown Sèvre Nantaise river, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm shutter priority, Clisson
Handwritten French rainbow quote on linen curtain in Clisson shop window, green shutters, Canon 6D Mark II 16-35mm
Old stone bridge arch covered in ivy and moss in soft May light, Sèvre Nantaise Clisson, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Stone bridge arch reflected in high brown Sèvre Nantaise water, lush green summer trees, Clisson, Canon 6D Mark II 70-300mm
Close-up of fern frond covered in orange spore clusters along Sèvre Nantaise riverside path, Clisson, Canon 6D Mark II 24-70mm Macro mode

La Rabatelière: Month of Our Lady

Posted on Posted in Architecture, Black and White Photography, Catholic, Film Photography, France, Landscape Photography, ReportageTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Canon AE1 Program | Fomapan 100

If you’ve read the Lourdes articles, you’ll know that I have a particular devotion to Our Lady and to the sites of her apparitions. So when May 1st came around — the first day of the Month of Our Lady — it seemed only right to do something about it.

Out with the Canon AE1 Program, loaded with a roll of Fomapan 100. Destination: La Rabatelière, about twenty minutes from the house, and the Sanctuaire de la Salette.

I said my Rosary in the car on the way over. Stopped off at the Parish Church of Saint-Charles and said an extra decade. Well, it’s the Month of Mary. Start as you mean to go on.

The French say: En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil. Don’t shed a thread of clothing in April. It was May now and 26°c. The Panama hat was already feeling like too much. Shirt sleeves it was.

I’ve been to La Rabatelière before, about twenty years ago, but I hadn’t really taken it in properly. This time I wanted to do it right.

The Parish Church of Saint-Charles is where you begin. It was built in 1633, consecrated the following year on the feast of Saint Charles; that coincidence of date gave the church its name and its patron. A solid, unshowy building — what the heritage plaques call style bas-breton: a massive façade, plain and purposeful. Exactly the kind of church that says: we are here, and we intend to stay.

Except, of course, they tried to burn it down.

On 8 December 1793, during the War of the Vendée, Republican forces put the church to the torch. For those who don’t know the War of the Vendée: it was the uprising of the western provinces against the Revolution, and the Republic’s response was one of the darkest episodes in French history. The colonnes infernales — the Infernal Columns — swept through this region killing civilians, burning farms, destroying everything they found. Here in the Vendée, people carry a devoir de mémoire, a duty of remembrance. They do not forget.

The church was restored in 1802. A century later, Abbé Hillairet enlarged it; he added a transept to give it the shape of a Latin cross.

Then, in 1905, came the Law on the Separation of Church and State. All Church property was to be inventoried by the state. For a lot of French Catholics, this was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was another assault. The Revolution had burned the church down. Now the Republic wanted a list of everything inside it.

In February 1906, word went around La Rabatelière that the inspectors were coming. The parishioners didn’t wait. They dragged tree trunks in front of the doors. When the inspectors arrived, they found the church barricaded and the congregation inside with their priest, refusing to move.

It held. For a while.

On 23 November 1906, they came back with axes. The left side door — the one on the north side of the nave — was broken open. You can still see the marks. Deep ones. Not the kind of thing that weathers away or gets sanded smooth. They are still there because nobody has chosen to remove them. La porte des Inventaires. That is what the door has been called ever since. The Inventory Door. Not a nickname that flatters the Republic.

I stood in front of it and thought: a hundred and twenty years, and there are the marks. The Vendée does not forget. It does not perform forgetting either.

Before heading up the hill I walked through the cemetery, which the municipal council reorganised around 1970. Near the entrance sits a small millstone, on display. It was found in a tomb believed to belong to François Suire (1753-1794): a miller, killed by Republican soldiers during the War of the Vendée. Forty-one years old. Nobody famous. No monument beyond this stone. But there it is. Still there.

Near the central cross is the granite tomb of Abbé Elie Hillairet (1840-1908), the parish priest here from 1873 until his death. He is, as we’ll see, the man behind most of what you can still see in this village. It seems fitting that he is buried at the foot of his life’s work.

Then the climb.

The Sanctuaire de la Salette sits on a hillside above the Petite Maine river, and I can confirm: it is a bit hilly. There were signs for the handicapped route but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. My legs were killing me by the time I reached the top.

For those who are less familiar with the apparitions of Our Lady: La Salette is one of the great Marian apparitions, confirmed by the Church in 1851. On 19 September 1846, on a mountainside near Corps in the French Alps, two young shepherds encountered a weeping woman seated on a stone. Her name: Mélanie Calvat, aged fourteen; and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven. The woman rose and spoke to them: about faith, about the breaking of Sunday rest, about blasphemy, about a people drifting from God. She gave each child a secret. Then she ascended into the light and was gone.

As apparitions go, La Salette has always struck me as a sorrowful one. Our Lady of Lourdes is serene; you see her in her grotto and feel peace. Our Lady of La Salette is weeping. She comes as a mother at the end of her patience, and her message is a warning. But it is still love. Only love would bother.

Hillairet understood this. He was curé here from 1873 to 1908, and he built this sanctuary as an act of deliberate faith during the most aggressively anticlerical period in French history. The Republic was dismantling the Church’s presence everywhere it could reach. Hillairet planted statues on a hillside.

Work began in 1887. Three groups of statues marking the three moments of the apparition were inaugurated the following summer. A Rosary monument came next. The path climbs to a tower: the Triumph of the Cross. At the summit, the Chapel of the Cross of Jerusalem, a square keep in local schist and brick, built in 1893. A Stations of the Cross path added along the hillside in 1902.

Standing up there, looking out over the valley, I thought about the miller buried down in the cemetery. And the axe marks in the church door. And Hillairet up here, building all of this in the teeth of a state that wanted nothing to do with it.

The Vendée has its wounds. It tends them carefully.

I am officially knackered. The Fomapan went through fine. The Panama hat stayed in the bag.

I drove home with the windows down, thinking that May 1st had been rather well spent.

All photographs shot on Fomapan 100, Canon AE1 Program. La Rabatelière, Vendée, May 2026.

Exterior façade of Saint-Charles church La Rabatelière Vendée, Canon AE1 Program Fomapan 100
Granite central cross with graves and tree line behind, La Rabatelière cemetery Vendée, Canon AE1 Program Fomapan 100
Axe-damaged Inventory Door with Merland coat of arms above arch, Saint-Charles church La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Chapel of Cross of Jerusalem with O Crux Ave 1893 inscription and turrets, La Rabatelière Vendée, Fomapan 100
Tiered Rosary monument with Our Lady statue atop against dark sky, La Salette sanctuary La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Our Lady standing with Mélanie and Maximin behind iron railings, La Salette sanctuary La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Triumph of Cross tower upper section with 1889 date, statues on parapet and cross against sky, La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Stone steps rising to La Salette sanctuary with Misericorde Priez sign on railing, La Rabatelière, Canon AE1 Program
Worn stone steps with iron railings ascending to La Salette sanctuary chapel behind, La Rabatelière, Canon AE1 Program
La Salette sanctuary complex: tower, chapel and Rosary monument, La Rabatelière
Dappled tree avenue in La Rabatelière cemetery with millstone of François Suire in middle distance, Fomapan 100
Hillside path with stone wall, eroded finial and Stations of the Cross above, La Salette La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Triumph of Cross tower from close below, cross at summit and statue on parapet, La Rabatelière Vendée, Canon AE1 Program
Full La Salette sanctuary with tower, ruined chapel arch and Rosary monument against grey sky, La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100
Narrow window slit in alternating schist and brick wall with raking sidelight, La Rabatelière Vendée, Canon AE1 Program
Triumph of Cross tower full height from across the lawn, cross at summit and figures at base, La Rabatelière, Fomapan 100