The latest issue of the magazine is out now!

Download

I'd like to share a photo of the mountains of the French Basque Country with you. It was taken in June 2022, during a trip to the South-West of France. I'm not sure why, but when this month's topic of curves was unveiled, an image of the Basque mountains immediately sprang to mind. There are certainly other places with the same characteristics, but I've never visited them.

Here, I went up to the Refuge d'Orisson very early from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where I was staying, because as I was having my coffee on the terrace at around 5 am, I noticed that the fog was settling over Saint-Jean. With the sun rising at around 6.30 am, I had to hurry. I'd found myself in the same situation the day before, with even less time on my hands, and I'd had to find a place with sufficient elevation with the hope to capture an inversion and, above all, less than 30 minutes by car. My choice was the Refuge d'Orisson, at an altitude of 780m, just 15 minutes from my accommodation.

I'd seen on Google Maps that there was a car park, which is quite rare on these small mountain roads, although it turned out to be impossible to park in the car park. It was empty, but the owner of the refuge ordered me to leave, telling me that it was reserved for customers. So I offered to buy something to eat or drink, but he refused. In short, parking wasn't an option, so I had to find a space on the side of the road to park. This is where I went the next day and from where I took this photo, about 1/4 hour before sunrise.

This photo is, in fact, a panorama made up of 11 vertical 100mm shots. What's the point of complicating your life when a single 35mm or 50mm shot would probably have sufficed? The resolution, of course! The level of detail is impressive, especially if you want to print in a large format (which is the main advantage), especially if, like me, you’re fond of panoramic formats.

The downside of this technique is the setup because, even though most image processing software manages parallax problems pretty well, you still have to make sure that your tripod is level. When you don't have a levelling base on your tripod, you have to do it by adjusting the legs of the tripod while keeping an eye on the tripod's spirit level. This can take some time, especially in the near-darkness of dawn, as in my case with the eyes of the fifty-year-old man. Once you've made sure that your tripod is level, you also need to take the wind into account because you're shooting at 100mm. The slightest gust of wind can ruin your series of photos, so you need to adapt your speed accordingly, which probably means increasing your ISO.

You need to check your images after each series and do one or two more series, just in case. There was hardly any wind that morning, so I was able to reduce the exposure to one second at ISO 100.

I opted for black and white because, at that time of day, the colours lacked punch and had a blue cast. What's more, it also allowed me to concentrate more on the contrasts and textures in post-processing.