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.

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.