France – all work and no play?
I’ve just returned from a flying visit to the Midi-Pyrenees to photograph a friend’s Gite. Last time I visited, about 6 years ago, the weather was unpredictably cloudy, so imagine my surprise on Monday morning when I discovered it was cloudy again!
So, being in France, we went for a typically long lunch at a neighbours house…
It was misty and trying to rain on Tuesday, and I began to think I’d upset my personal weather god somehow. I photographed the interiors anyway.
Finally, the sun came out on Wednesday, and I managed to get photographs of the pool and exterior of the gite. I even managed to photograph the swallows using the pool as their personal bath. And finally I managed to use the pool myself, for the two hours I had left before departing for Toulouse airport!
If you fancy a longer break in this beautiful part of south west France, full details (and the old photographs) can be found at the Branche d’Olive web site.
A friend’s endorsement
Well, Chris and Delphine haven’t even got their official photos yet! Just two weeks after their wedding I’d sent them a digital album, a DVD full of images of the weekend, some hand printed B&W prints, and a web gallery so that everyone could see some of those photos…..
This is what Chris has to say:
We finally took our contact sheets back to the ‘traditional’ chap with our selection of pictures they would print up for the album they’ll make up, and his assistant was annoyed that we wanted 140 instead of 150 prints and to give the other 10 prints to our family as presents. Apparently this is Not Done as they rely on family buying, on average, 200 prints per wedding to make up their money. As they’d already had EUR 1500 of our money since August I was pretty upset at such bare-faced greed, but was restrained enough to say ‘Oh really?’ As a special, this time only offer she let us do this. Hmm. I won’t be recommending him again, good though his pictures are. I have to say, your method is infinitely preferable to this old-fashioned we-hold-the-negs, you may not scan our pix attitude (it took us six months to physically carry the contact sheet album round our families in France and the UK, and we still missed some people out – we were contractually forbidden to put them online and they wrote on them in marker pen to make this impossible anyway). And your system was much faster too. Thanks again.