I have a confession. I am cursed by camera envy. Wherever I go in the world, I am taunted by some breed of super-snapper, whose photographic equipment is so advanced, it requires a bag bigger than my suitcase.
They turn dials and press knobs and stride unthinking into the shots of lesser mortals — and leave me and my peewee digital automatic feeling wretched and insignificant.
“Take a picture of that,” my wife urges, pointing at a lion-juggling wildebeest or something equally once-in-a-lifetime, but all I can do is bury my camera in my pocket, somehow convinced that no picture is better than photographic humiliation.
So, in the spirit of self-improvement, and to help me get over this affliction, I headed to Biarritz in early winter to join a photo holiday run by an expat British landscape photographer.
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Jonathan Chritchley took one look at me and handed me a five-year-old Nikon, which he keeps for novices. I hung it around my neck, enthralled by its array of switches, but feeling a bit of a fraud. “We’ll set it to manual,” he said, “so you can sort out the aperture and shutter speed yourself.”
“The what now?” I stammered, but I was assured that it’s all within the novice’s grasp. At 7am the next day, I was still fiddling with the Nikon as we left our beachside hotel and drove almost to the Spanish border, 30 minutes away, in search of wild seas and rocks.
Jonathan shrugged off the light rain and looked skyward like the ancient mariner. He nodded happily as the first cracks of light shattered some large, black clouds — if you’re shooting landscapes, it turns out that proper weather is what you want. Blue skies might make Bahamian holiday snaps look pretty, but a nimbostratus punctured by golden fingers of sun brings drama to any scene.
Jonathan runs photo courses all over the world, but most are held near his home in southern Aquitaine, six miles from Biarritz at the foothills of the Pyrenees. For a “creative” holiday, the head count is blessedly low — he purposely keeps each course to just a handful of students so that everyone has a generous share of his time.
With the Nikon perched atop a tripod, also borrowed, I stood hopefully on wet sand as a cluster of dark grey rocks rose up from the receding sea. Over the next hour, I took 90 photos from various angles, and my course-mates appeared just as trigger-happy.
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There were three of them, photographers of varying skill levels, and over the next few days a range of awe-inspiring locations, coupled with the ever-helpful Jonathan’s advice, seemed to have the cheerful trio convinced that this was money well spent. For me, it was a crash course in all things photographic, and I’m stunned by how quickly I took to it.
As with most rookies, my default setting to date had been to frame every subject in the middle, but once I’d been shown how things look better when they’re a third of the way in and a third of the way up (or down), there was no going back. At quaint little harbours and ancient jetties on tranquil lakes, I took the odd shot you might actually hang on your wall. Well, perhaps not your wall — but I was off to Ikea for some photo frames as soon as I got home.
At the end of each day’s shooting, we loaded our snaps onto laptops and were schooled in the art of postproduction. It is amazing what a little digital enhancement — the brightening of colour here, or lightening of shadow there — can do for almost any picture.
At dinner in a lively seaside restaurant, my fellow students and I shared moules frites and a Spanish red, while they warned me that I would probably fall for photography in a big way. Maybe it was the tuition, maybe the location — Biarritz is upbeat and charming, a grand old seaside town with a whiff of Nice about it that is just begging to be photographed — but I couldn’t deny that I was hooked. When I left a few days later, I did so well and truly bitten by the photography bug.
Two days after getting home, I bought a Canon digital SLR on eBay. It’s the best £240 I’ve ever spent.
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To book a photographic holiday with Jonathan Chritchley, call 00 33 6 71 00 37 69 or visit oceancaptureadventures.com. French photo breaks start at £448pp for a two-day course or £1,166 for five days, including accommodation at Le Grand Large hotel, in Biarritz, but not meals or flights. EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Biarritz from Gatwick and Bristol, Ryanair (0871 246 0000, ryanair.com) from Stansted, Birmingham and Dublin.