The coast of France

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG HSM, 0.3" f/16, iso 50, tripod. St. Mathieu, France.

I have always been deeply fascinated by the sea, but in my galleries I don't have a lot of sea photos - the majority of my landscapes is taken between the mountains. So, in late 2009, I decided to spend a couple of weeks in Normandy and Bretagne (France) for a trip focuses on sea/coast landscapes.

I had not planned a lot the trip, so other than a couple of famous places (the Falaises of Etretat and the Mont Saint Michel), I had not pre-planned destinations. How to find the best places? The GPS helped me a lot. I have a TomTom 730 and, even though it is far from perfect, it has many nice features, in particular it lists many scenic/view points. During the central hours of the day, when the light was not great for photos, I tried to visit all the view points in my area (every day I moved by about 100km), and once I found the best places, I bookmarked them in the GPS, to come back the day after at sunrise. Other times I did not even use the viewpoints feature, I just selected places that "looked good" on the map...the coast of Bretagne is a great place for landscape, and it is easy to find scenic areas.

Sometimes, when I had some spare time, I used another strategy - I set the GPS on "shortest route" instead of "fastest route". Shortest route may take way more time than the fastest route, because with this setting the GPS often avoid highways and main road, it makes you drive on the smallest and most remote roads in the countryside in order to achieve the route that is as close as possible to a straight line between departure and destination...you have to be careful with this setting, because sometimes the GPS try to make you drive on impossible "off roads"...but if you have time, it is fun and it helps to find nice photography places that you would have missed by driving on the highways.

December is a good month to visit Bretagne...it is not exaggeratedly cold, the weather is often stormy (=great for photos), and the sunrise is late, around 8.30 a.m., with good light lasting until about 10 a.m.. Actually many times I have even arrived earlier - the second day I had not idea about the exact hour of sunrise, so I arrived on the field at 6 a.m. ...I had to wait almost three hours! I was in Etretat and I remember waiting on the seaside, staring the darkness in front of me, surrounded by the roar of the waves. It felt like being in a cinema, when the movie has not begun yet and for some instants you just stare a black screen, with loud music into background...with the difference that the "dark screen" of Etretat toke hours until the first lights begun to paint an image. It has been a fascinating experience, but next time I checked the sunrise hour on www.sunrisesunset.com :-)

The photo that opens this article it taken at St. Mathieu, another of the fantastic places that I found thanks to the "scenic points" of the GPS. The position of St. Mathieu makes it a great place for photos at sunset, and I was lucky to find the perfect sky - some clouds and a little of sun. I loved the combination of colors in the sky, the blue of the water and the rocks into foreground! It was a spectacle to view but it was not easy to transmit the same beauty in a photo. I have tried many different points of view, and from every point I have taken 7-8 photos...every photo was slightly different, due to the blur of water given by the slow shutter speed. I ended up choosing this photo between many other similar images because I like that small area lit by warm orange light at the top of the wave.

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