A Day In France

This week I was fortunate to be able to spend a day in France with a photographer friend.  It was fantastic weather with temperatures hitting 25, maybe 26 or 27 during the day. This, of course, bought out many people to the beaches and created its own set of difficulties later in the day when we were looking for those uncluttered cameos.

We started at Le Touquet and wondered up and down the beach area as people started to arrive for the day.

This was one of the first images I took, it was as though somebody had turned up in advance and set it up ready for the people to arrive. Apart from cropping and a low opacity layer of gaussian blur this is much as taken.


Further along the beach and there were more people starting to arrive, but the scenes were still very simple with few elements in them. This image also uses the low opacity gaussian blur layer to give it a slightly dreamy effect.

Sometimes things happen which are difficult to explain. I have no idea who these people were or what they were doing, but the tubing and protective gear indicated that perhaps it was some kind of drain repair...who knows! This image is called  "Who you gonna call? Ghost busters"


As the day wore on more people were emerging and it was more difficult to identify those special moments, or as Cartier Bresson would call it ...that decisive moment.

This was one of those lucky shots,  saw the girl on the mono cycle too late to get a front view, but as she passed I turned and was determined not to miss the chance of a shot, just as this woman stopped to look. Pure luck.

I call this "I wish I could do that"

Later in the day we went on to Etaples war cemetery  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89taples_Military_Cemetery

Making use of my fish eye to obtain a more inclusive view I also decided that I would try out my IR camera, as I had read that cemeteries are good places to use IR photography.

Finally a grave which got me thinking......
You will notice that the grave in the right hand corner is a German grave. There are areas where the German soldiers are buried together, but this one is amongst British graves, why would this be so? I have tried to find an answer by doing a web search but so far I have not found out why. If anybody has an answer I would be interested to hear.