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
It was Friday. The boss had come round and asked where we were with our workload. I was fully up to date. He asked if I wanted to finish work that morning or work the Friday afternoon. Strangely enough I said, oh alright, I’ll finish at lunchtime then. And so started my four week Summer holidays.
I’d done a reportage of Bouffay at night a while ago and wanted to have another bash at it. And as usual I found the pub… Ah well, I was a good boy and only had a single pint. Yes that can happen! Not often, but it has been known.
I needed food and ended up having a goats cheese and honey pizza. Don’t forget that this is France and that anything can happen as far as food is concerned. On the way back to the pub for number two, pint number two and not a “number two,” even if the loos have just been done up and look rather nice, I just wanted to get a photo of the Café du Cinéma, which is a cafe just next to a cinema but is a thing of beauty with it’s mosaic front and just looks sooo French. I still get emotional every time I pass by. Am I the only person who gets like that when they see a certain building?
Hello, my name is Ian, and I like looking at certain buildings and they just touch me.
Back to the pub just to say hi as the late shift came on, just to say hi. That second pint was just circumstantial.
I was taking the X100F out for a spin that night, and although everyone says it, I’m going to to say it too: It’ a great little camera for street photography.
Yesterday, I was out with my daughter in Nantes. Nothing new about that, but those who know me, know that already. What was new was that I had just bought a Canon 85mm F1.8 lens and wanted to try it out. Kate had decided that we would not go to the pub but go the Anneaux de Buren instead. And to be more exact, go to the Altercafé in the Hangar à Bananes!
So, we did. I usually get green tea flavoured with ginger and lemon, and Kate has Orangina, and we get to eat a nice chocoloate brownie together. Shock and Horror (which always were a class double act)! No more brownies. Oh woe is me! And her! Luckily they still had Orangina, but I had to make do with a beer. I know, I know. The lengths I will go to to stop that child being traumatised by lack of rather tasty chocolate brownie! I give, give, give, and give some more. We even had to slum it and have a cheese and charcuterie board with toast. Totally yummy, but missing that chocolatey taste that we were after. Mind you, if you do get French cheese and charcuterie that tastes of chocolate, you might want to send it back and choose something else…
Whilst we were offering up our misfortune for the Holy Souls, a band started setting up. Yes, we were going to get live music! The guy from the band came up the mezzanine where Kate and I were to take some photos on his phone. I asked would he mind if I took a couple of photos. He asked are you on Instagram. I was and immediately followed him. I said I’d send him a link to the photos once they had been edited, and these are the photos that you’ll be seeing in this article.
The proceeded to set up and do their sound check. We weren’t able to stay for the concert, but I thought what the heck, I’ll get some good photos and as I’ve never photographed a band before, I thought it would be a good environment in which to learn. No hoards of screaming fans to wade through…
So here is the photo reportage of the Farman sound check, and here’s their Instagram account. Tools of the trade were the Canon 6D Mark II, with the 50mm F1.8 lens, and its big brother, the 85mm F1.8 lens.
In 1987, my father bought me my first SLR. Notice the D is missing. So, I did say SLR and not DSLR. It was a Praktica MTL3 and it is now retired (polite way of saying Kaput) and sitting on a shelf in my son’s room. It took film. And the first roll of film that I shot with it was down Humber Street
In 1987, Humber Street was the fruit market of Hull, and I’m not making an unpolitically correct joke about sensitive men looking to do sensitive things with other sensitive men. No. That would be wrong and very un-enlightened of me. No, they did that in other places dotted around the city.
I used to shoot my film, get it developed at a place on Newland Ave, where I got the camera, and the guy would present me with a contact sheet and critique my photos. For those of you who were born after this analogical age, a contact sheet is where you lay out the negatives on a sheet of photographic paper, and expose the paper, and develop it, and get a whole load of thumbnail images that you can look at and decide which were worth printing. Yes, just like the thumbnails you get on the gallery on your phone, except it might have taken a little longer…
There was one image that pleased me immensely of a cat sitting quietly on a box of fruit wondering what the hell I was up to. That was then.
Skip forward a few years, just a few mind you, because I’m not an old git yet. No sonny Jim, I’m just a git! The area came into it’s own in 2017 when Hull was declared City Of Culture. People were proud of their city again and there were whisperers whispering, “Come to ‘Ull, it’s not shite anymore!”
The ‘gentrification’ of the area started with bars, and even Art Galleries! Then of course came the Humber Street Sesh, showing some amazing local musical talent. This year’s Street Sesh was last night, so you’ve missed it!
At the bottom is the Minerva. Minerva is of course the wise old owl in Greek mythology. It is also a pub which always has such a special place in people’s hearts. They do good food and good beer, and good gin, so the wife was more than happy.
The two nights before these photos, I had met up with and old friend from my school days who was kind enough not to mention all the silly shit that I used to get up to in my youth. The next night was a school reunion with people I hadn’t seen since 1985 and 1988 for the lads. Tales were told that I will not repeat here including stories about a pogo stick, and how I once said “merde” to my French teacher and left the room throwing my French books into the bin on the way out. They told my French wife, “Well he always was a bit European….”
Well now, you’ve kept reading up to now so I suppose I should tell you about these photos. They were taken on the Sunday night when I needed some “me” time to deal with the overwhelming overload of nostalgia. I was out with the Canon 6D Mark II, and the 16-35mm lens. Hope you like them.
You might just have noticed that I didn’t publish anything last Wednesday. And even if you didn’t not notice, I still didn’t publish anything last Wednesday. I had just had some time off work and had just got back from an amazing visit to Hull to meet up with some old friends that I was at school with, and hadn’t seen since school. The next couple of articles will feature photos from that visit.
Soooooo… We travelled up from the Vendée, to catch the ferry at Zeebrugge, in Belgium. We usually set off quite early but this time it was a bit silly kind of early. No it wasn’t, it was the downright obscene kind of early! That kind of early that you only do when it’s summer and really hot during the day, and you want to drive at least a couple of hundred kilometres without passing out from the heat.
Needless to say, we were “on time.” Not the first in the queue, but not far off. Anyway, the sail over was really good. The food and drink were great and we actually got a good night’s sleep. So fresh eyed and bushy tailed as only fresh eyed and bushy tailed little bunnies can be, we arrived in Hull. Yes Hull is what I consider as home… You can take the boy out of Hull, but not the Hull out of the boy. I still get emotional when I listen to the Housemartins. Which is why, as soon as we got off the boat and had to wait for the hotel room, we went off to Beverley.
There were two places I wanted to visit. The Minster and St Mary’s Church. I’m not forcing religion down your throats, but as I said in the article about the St Nicolas Basilica in Nantes, these buildings were designed by men in which to connect with God, and everything in them leads man to God. Even if you’re not a believer, you can tell that this is no ordinary building. I’m always amazed by the architecture and how the builders managed to construct such edifices and what technology the must have used.
I love the intricacy in the stone work, or in the wood carvings, or the paint on the organ pipes, but what really moves me are the memorials to the dead of the World Wars, and the Colours (battle honours) of the regiments that no longer exist but had men that fought and died together as brothers. In some of these photos you can what remains of these “flags” and how it is so important not to forget those that went before us.
Le Voyage à Nantes is an art festival that happens every year in Nantes. They give out maps with the green line that travels all the way through the city and if you don’t have a map, you can just follow the green line on the ground. Yes. I shit you not. They have painted a green line that you can follow all around the city. Did the creator have a cocaine problem but wanted to be eco-friendly? That’s not what really bothers me. What really bothers me is that the whole line is 12km long! If that’s not intense then I don’t know what is!!!
Not wanting to be selfish, and sharing is caring and all that, I decided to bring along Killian. He needs to get out more and get some vitamin D. I also needed a minder. He’s always good for that kind of thing.
We started by the most important thing of the day. Food. Luckily it was lunchtime so I felt slightly less guilty about eating in public. Right, the first stop is usually the Sugar Blue Café. I really like the food. It’s actually healthy, but not only healthy, it looks good, but not only looks good, but tastes good, but not only tastes good, but they have cheesecake. Yes. Cheesecake. I’m so weak. But it goes so well with the cup of tea…
Of course we had to walk a bit just to feel even less guilty about the Cheesecake. Did somebody say Cheesecake? I ended up at Place Graslin. Needed coffee. Kiki had a beer. It was a bit warm after all. About 36°C… I told him about the day I was there with Kate and that it was just as warm and how she ended up getting soaked to the skin in the fountain, and how I was getting all panicky because I didn’t have a towel for her or a change of clothes.
We had to decide how to follow the line. We were sitting on the terrace of Le Molière and thought we’d be intelligent. Bad idea, but we managed to get the map up on our phones. The line passes right by the café, and you can either go left, or right. We tried, rock, paper, scissors, which is generally foolproof especially when it comes down to who is going to pay for the beers. But in the end we went for the more conventional, “oh f**k it!”
So having “f**ked it,” we eplored the Cours Cambronne, named after a famous Napoleonic General, who decided that he didn’t want to surrender to the British at Waterloo… Ah well! Silly billy!!
He became major of the Imperial Guard in 1814, and accompanied Napoléon into exile to the island of Elba, where he was a military commander. He then returned with Napoléon to France on 1 March 1815 for the Hundred Days, capturing the fortress of Sisteron (5 March), and was made a Count by Napoléon when they arrived at Paris. Cambronne was seriously wounded at the Battle of Waterloo and was taken prisoner by the British.
The exact circumstances of his surrender to the British are disputed. At the battle’s conclusion, Cambronne was commanding the last of the Old Guard when General Colville called on him to surrender. According to a journalist named Rougement, Cambronne replied: “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas !” (“The Guard dies and does not surrender!”). These words were often repeated and put on the base of a statue of Cambronne in Nantes after his death.
Other sources reported that Colville insisted and ultimately Cambronne replied with one word: “Merde!” (literally, “Shit!”, figuratively, “Go to hell!”) This version of the reply became famous in its own right, becoming known as le mot de Cambronne (“the word of Cambronne”) and repeated in Victor Hugo’s account of Waterloo in his novel Les Misérables and in Edmond Rostand’s play L’Aiglon. The name Cambronne was later used as a polite euphemism (“What a load of old Cambronne!”) and sometimes even as a verb, “cambronniser“.
We said goodbye to the little girl and allowed here to get back on her pedestal. Or was she trying to get down?
We found the line again, and then saw a dotted line… Interesting… An alternative? Well, what the heck. We followed it and discovered traces of Nantes more artisanal past, traces of joiners, cobblers, plumbers, bookbinders, and industrial tribunals. I love seeing these little bits of history still fighting to leave their mark on the town. A town or city has to be in tune with its past and it’s own story. People leave their mark on a place. The question is how will leave our mark, and what will that mark be?
For the photo geeks out there. The tools today were the Canon 6D Mark II and the 16-35mm lens.
This was my first go at doing a photo shoot and as any perfectionist worth their salt I wanted it to be as perfect as possible. I’d done my homework about how to approach working with a model. I’d looked up so many tutorials you can’t even begin to imagine how much footage I must have seen or the quantity of articles read.
There are some basic rules that seem self explanatory, but are worth following:
Listen to the model. They have a message to give to their audience, and you need to know what it is, and discuss what kind of photos or video they want doing, and how this will help them to portray this message.
Do your homework. Preparation is everything. Know what kit you need, or might need. This can include batteries that have been charged, memory cards at the ready, or enough rolls of film for the purists out there. This also includes a back-up camera… Murphy’s Law and all that!
Be a gentleman. Avoid any type of douchebaggery. Your model is human being and deserves all the respect you would want them to show you. When I did this shoot we were both equals, and most definitely on equal footing. She wasn’t my thing to play around with and take photos as if she was a potted plant. I’m fine for giving direction, but there are limits. Apparently some photographers forget this very important rule and come over as really creepy and sordid.
Show some of the images so the model can have an idea of how the shoot went.
Editing. Go home and start the editing process, or get you films to to the lab, and hope they don’t screw up the development and that you negatives arrive without scratches, which once happened to me. Choose your photos from the huge amount you’ve taken because you wanted to be sure and gt at least one reasonable photo. I took one of the chosen few photos and edited in about 5 ways and showed it to the model,so she could give me her opinion and it would also give me a process to follow for the rest of the editing.
The Model is a Human Being!! I’d really like to come back to remembering the model is a human being and must be treated with the upmost respect. That person in the viewfinder is somebody’s daughter, sister, mother, spouse etc. Don’t be a cad and even if you are not, you must act always as the perfect gentleman.
My research on how to approach photography with a model took me through many articles found on Google and a good few videos on YouTube. There was one in particular that stood in my mind and was more about a certain philosophy instead of just technique. And here’s a link to it!
IJM Photography 