Bonsoir tout le monde! Autumn is in full swing here in Poitiers, and while fiddling around with my camera last night I realised that I hadn’t yet had a walk along the riverside, which quite frankly is shameful. It’s gorgeous here, especially with all the autumnal colours gilding the landscape right now. I do tend to put these things off, but the thing about autumn is that you never know when the last golden sun drenched day will give way to the endless grey of winter, so time was of the essence to take myself for a walk along the riverside. And as I love taking photos, and my dad said I should share more of my photography on here, here we are!

I also decided to give myself a little challenge on this walk and only used my 50mm lens, rather than my multipurpose zoom which I tend to default to. (I have a Canon EOS M5 which my father gave to me for Christmas about 7 years ago and which I love very much. I took it interrailing all around Italy when I was 18 and it’s been with me since). This lens was a gift last year for my birthday, and I really hope that the photos upload well enough to show the crispness that this lens gives them. Because of some fancy camera stuff I don’t quite understand it doesn’t “act” like a true 50mm lens (like on my film camera, which is my most treasured possesion. I’ll write about its story sometime) but I still like it. It’s always a little closer to the subject than I think it will be, something to get used to by using it more often.

Playing around with different setting and exposures on the camera, I feel like I was more able to capture that autumnal warmth than just using the automatic mode. However, I think they could be better. I sent some of these photos to a friend of mine who is also a photographer (a VERY talented one, I will see if I can link their portfolio at the end) and they asked if I was planning to colour grade them. I think I’d like to have a mess around with them and see what they end up looking like. I have only had one proper professional photography gig (a wedding, the photos for which I was very proud of) and hadn’t graded those pictures as they came out really beautifully anyway, so I’ve never had the urge to colour grade before (unless you count turning the exposure down on some phone snaps on VSCO).

For those curious about the route I took, it was a very short one, just from the Pont Saint-Cyprien to the Pont Neuf. I took it between classes, and it reminded me that a nice walk need not be a three hour ramble in order to appreciate the beauty of my surroundings, it could be bitesized and fit between other parts of my day.

This walk also made me think of where I was born in Sussex, and the rolling countryside I was so lucky to grow up amongst. After several years in London I felt like the seasons were beginning to be lost to me, and I would remark whenever I went home on how nice it was to see the green again; vast endless life spilling out over the rolling South Downs. Though Poitiers is far less grey than London, and the university campus far greener, it is still nice to get lost in little pockets of nature amidst the city. It feels like time stops there, and I feel we need that more and more these days.

À bientôt mes ami.e.s!

Iona xx