Bienvenue à Fontainebleau
Finally, after hours of retouching i’m somewhat close to being satisfied with the selection and post-production of most of the shots taken in Fontainebleau, France. The main pictures can be found in my flickr stream, or in the linked gallery at the right bottom of this blog. But first of all: i will never ever curse the german radio again! You might think that it’s repetitive and boring but that’s only until you drive through the french countryside. Here you have to discover that having no CDs in your car is as funny as half a day in purgatory, only with chanson. We stayed at Grez-sur-Loing which is located about 10km south of Fontainebleau. The town’s best know landmark is without question the Tour de Ganne, here seen in a slightly tonemapped nightshot (5x time exp, +2 EV stepping).
"Tour de Ganne" à Grez-sur-Loing, France
The local camping site seems well organised, it has reasonable prices, everything is clean, there is a bakery about 10 minutes away and they have WiFi 🙂 Anyway, we did not drive there just to hang around the camping site. Having built up our base we packed our stuff and went to work. Let me tell you one thing, Fontainebleau is the undisputed bouldering heaven. To paraphrase a co-worker: “You made the mistake to go to Fontainebleau. No you will compare other areas to Bleau for the rest of your life.” But see for yourselves, here are two slight impressions:
Blocks in the wood.
More blocks in the wood 🙂
Unfortunately due to the unforgiving laws of physics and gravity in particular the whole trip had to be shot without a polarizer. Three days prior to our departure it fell and cracked… Even though i ordered a replacement immediately after this devastating 80€ incident it didn’t arrive in time, thx to DHL. It would have been the perfect situation to further explore it’s effects but i just had to get along without it.
All in all the whole trip was a refreshing alternation to my common studio photography workflow as i relied much more on available light and reflectors than on speedlights. They are far less work and tend to blend in more smoothly which of course isn’t that surprising. My personal highlight of the trip is the mixed light shot of Dirk pulling up easily. As usual in bright sun situations like these flashes are competing with the available light, dictating the maximum synchronization speed. The new Nikon D7000 can sync up to 1/320th of a second but using modified Cactus V2s triggers the picture had to be shot with a maximum speed of 1/200th or otherwise the curtain would have creeped into the frame. Maybe fresh batteries would have helped reaching the de-facto standard of a 1/250th well known from other camera/trigger combinations. David Hobby did an article on this a few weeks ago, i heavily recommend it as this article and its archived logical predecessors highlight and illustrate this “sync limit” topic nicely. You might want to use his search to look them up. As a result of the 1/200th Dirks face is a little more blurry as the AL burns in more heavily at this sync speed. In addition to the AL the reflector placed to the left which was supposed to fill in some of the shadows added to this effect and should have been taken out in hindsight.
Hope you enjoyed my first full article on this blog. Depending on my spare time there might be some more coverage of Fontainebleau. Thanks for reading, P.
Patrick Wenz 