I came to the Vendée, I saw the richness of the land, and I conquered
Photoshop. Thank you, Roger, for showing me how the digital Nikon worked,
driving me around the countryside and turning me into a creative genius. All
in three days. Who would have thought it?
My previous experience suggested that digital photography can damage your
sanity. Remember, if you can, the days when films yielded a limited number
of prints that were stuck in albums with hand-written captions. Now the digi
shoots every holiday moment, and random images are downloaded in their
hundreds. Unappreciated, the pictures fade into the dustbin of history – or,
in a computer household, the recycle bin.
Could we do better? Of course. A mastery of Photoshop basics produces images
that are worth framing as gifts, printing in a book – easier and less costly
than you may imagine – or presenting as a limited-edition slide show. You
don’t even have to be a good photographer, though it helps.
My fellow travellers, Ben and Sara, a retired psychiatrist and a photographer
specialising in naked mothers on the verge of giving birth, knew a lot more
than I did, but Roger Stowell, who moved to France in 2001, gears his
instruction to individual needs, giving encouragement to all.
His game plan is simple: after breakfast, he took us out to photograph markets
and fishing fleets, display cases for the ingredients of local life, both
edible and human. Lunch was next on the agenda, eaten in affordable village
restaurants.
In the afternoon, we downloaded the morning’s catch on to our laptops and
applied Photoshop under Roger’s expert eye. He trained at Portsmouth Art
School as a painter, film and print maker, but it was the budget camera he
bought on a whim that triggered his career in fashion and portrait
photography.
In 1985 he seized the chance to get in on the birth of the gastronomic
revolution, a move he has never regretted. “My mother didn’t cook, so I was
brought up to look on food as fuel, which may be why I always had a passion
for it. The more I worked in fashion, the more I realised that I have a
greater empathy for a dead tuna than a frock on a catwalk.”
At 5.30pm on the dot, he shut up shop, put on his chef’s apron and bounded
into the kitchen to prepare our dinner. His wife, Jenny, a model when they
first met 35 years ago, was an attentive hostess, dispensing a cup of coffee
here, a glass of wine there. A table, we were bowled over by Roger’s
expertise. Every evening he turned ingredients we had seen on our
expeditions into a four-course meal, no sweat, no fuss, simply delicious. We
gorged, we drank wine from his friends’ vineyard at Prieurée La Chaume, we
talked, we laughed. The learning curve doesn’t come more enjoyable than
this.
And we did learn. Ben bought his digital Nikon two years ago and used it
mainly to photograph holiday scenery. He booked a week with Roger to expand
his “social photography”. “I learnt to blend and balance colour, sharpen my
images and adjust to the light to make the most of them. The food was a
bonus.”
Meanwhile, Sara shaped her 30 best photographs into a slide show that
encapsulated everything we had seen on our travels. And me? On the final
morning, I took pictures of inquisitive horses on the banks of a fishing
lake, then used my newly mastered lasso tool to switch their heads, chestnut
on a grey body and vice versa. Weird, but what you see is rarely what you
get in digital photography. Eat your heart out, Van Gogh.
Need to know
The seven-day Camerahols course (00 33 251 87 81 72, www.camerahols.com)
costs £850pp, including B&B, four-course dinners with wine, and
transfers from La Rochelle airport. £650 for nonparticipating partner.
Gourmet weekend course £550pp, with three nights’ B&B,
four-course dinners with wine and transfers. Ryanair (www.ryanair.com)
flies to La Rochelle from Stansted, from £20 return.
Roger Stowell’s top tips for digital photographs
1. Buy as big a memory card as you can afford.
2. Be clear about what you want to achieve and set your camera
accordingly.
3. Capture as much detail as possible. You can’t replace elements that
have never been recorded.
4. Go for the big close-up: tightly cropped images can be rewarding.
5. Consider the differences in light throughout the day: a subject at
dawn is different from the same subject at dusk.
