So yet again I’ve taken some photographs that will be almost identical to the millions of other images taken by others who’ve visited the same place. But it’s a pretty place. And one that inspired many artists including some of the famous French impressionists (Honfleur in Normandy). Besides, trying to get a nice photo to print and frame at home is a lot cheaper than paying the prices the local art shops were asking for mostly fairly mediocre paintings for the passing tourist trade.
I’m waiting for a couple of prints to come back from an online order service but I’ve had fun trying to give them a bit of a stylised old-master look – and getting them printed on to some really nice Hahnemuhle German Etch paper should give much nicer results than standard photo-paper.
For those who haven’t been, Honfleur is a lovely medieval town with a picturesque harbour surrounded by cobbled streets, art shops and restaurants. Calvados and seafood are in abundance. Car parking spaces aren’t!
It was a lovely place to wander around, and I enjoyed slowing down photography wise too by using a manual focus (Samyang) lens for many of my photographs – generally I find that if I slow down and use less capable auto-everything gear, I get results that I’m happier with.
The weather was well-behaved too. No featureless cloudless skies (I don’t think theses are a feature of Normandy), but not too much rain and enough golden sunlight peering through on occasion to show the town at its best.
I could post many more photographs and that’s before moving on to other nearby attractions like Giverny (Monet’s garden) and Rouen. Suffice to say, however, that it was a very enjoyable short break made all the better by travelling to the continent without going anywhere near an airport – slow travel, slow photography, what’s not to like?
The Photographer's Block 