It has been know for me to frequent a certain establishment in Nantes now and again, he said whilst competing for the understatement of the year. That establishment, aka Daddy’s happy place, aka mes quartiers à Nantes, aka the pub, aka home from home, is the John McByrne Irish Pub, 21 Rue des Petites Écuries , Nantes.
It is a place for which I have a great affection, not only because they supply me with Guinness, and Taytos imported from Ireland (and I’m going to be really controversial here, I prefer the salt and vinegar, but even the cheese and onion are perfectly palatable), but most importantly, the bar staff, that started out as just people, have ended up being friends. And that Dear Reader, is the most important, and wonderful outcome.
And, (you should never start a sentence with And, but I’m feeling a little rebelious here about gramatical conventions, oh my life has such depth, and what was I going to say again, ah yes, no, it’s gone again…)
Oh yes, back on track there… And, as a friend, I want to help and offer support. And, (oh there I go again) this time I did it by not just buying them chocolate, and other rather naughty things to eat, but by coming along to support them in the annual Course de Serveurs et Garçons de Café, Nantes 2019.
Wow, only took me four paragraphs to get to my subject. I’m doing well today!!
Here is Eydie with the official tray with a coffee cup, energy drink, sparkling water, non alcholic beer, and an orange soda.
Each competitor must carry this tray over nearly three and a half kilometres, with time being deducted for spilt drinks. They are not allowed to run, only walk, and of course they have to go up the stairs in the Passage Pommeraye, twice. I’ll just let that sink in for a few moments. Take the time to imagine them going up all those stairs with a tray, looking slightly odd in fancy dress costumes. Is that image in your mind? You’ll see it in the photos anyway!
They didn’t end up on the podium, but they did win best costume and won best team spirit, which is even more important.
Here are the photos taken on the X100F which was perfect for capturing the whole atmosphere of the day.
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.
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!
As you might have realised by now, sometimes I seem to find myself in Nantes quite often. Ever the creature of habit I have my “spots” that I seem to go to and one of them is the street between la Place Royale, and la Place Graslin, La Rue Crébillon. It’s basically where rich people do their clothes shopping and you have to be skinny to get into any of those clothes, but it’s all so elegant. Along the way you have the Passage Pommeraye which also oozes French elegance, with Hermès at the top, and a rather delightful place at the bottom that sells chocolat and macarons….
I could tell you the history of the place but you can look it up on Wikipedia if you want. This is more about the photography…
The Passage Pommeraye is a small shopping mall in central Nantes, France, named after its property developer, Louis Pommeraye. Construction started at the end of 1840 and was completed on 4 July 1843. The Passage Pommeraye is a passage between two streets, the rue Santeuil and rue de la Fosse, with one 9.40 m higher than the other. Midway, there is a flight of steps and the mall then continues on another floor. Two architects, Jean-Baptiste Buron and Hippolyte Durand Gasselin, contributed to its design, which is very elaborate and includes renaissance style sculptures. The Passage Pommeraye has been classified as a historic monument since 1976.
This is a collection of photos taken on my last visit, taken on the Canon 6D Mark II with the 16-35mm lens which has become a firm favourite with me. I enjoy the distorsion and how I can use it creatively, as well as the sheer joy of diving into the scene before my eyes. I also brought out the Helios 44-2 58mm lens to take some photos in the café where I like to have a couple of coffees to keep me going for the rest of the afternoon. An idea for another article perhaps…
IJM Photography 