The model that day was Jessica who was very professional despite her young age, easy going and very patient given the relative inexperience of the 3 photographers.

This is one of the shots, one atmosphere from that session. More to come later.

He’s been a great friend for years, always happy to see us when we came home, always bringing a toy or slippers as a gift, always playful even when he aged, always up for a walk around the neighbourhood no matter the weather and always hungry, he could sniff a piece of bread from half a mile

What he enjoyed most was swimming and fetching huge pieces of wood we’d throw … Winter, summer, sea, river or mountain lake, no matter the temperature, he’d rush in …

Unfortunately, as he aged, he suffered from a severe case of arthritis which reduced his mobility month after month and last December 21st, on the day of the supposedly end of the world, we had to have him put to sleep … He was 14 and a half.

He sure left a void in the house … 40kg of unconditional love missing … and it still feels odd not seeing him coming to steal my slippers in the morning …

So rest in peace my old friend, I’ll never forget you.

We watched the sun set over the Alps and then set up the camera and timer by one of the old stone sheds partially erect at the top.

The camera clicked away for more than two hours but when I returned to it to shoot a dark frame and light paint the foreground I discovered in horror that the front of the lens and in fact pretty much all the equipment was covered with dew !!!

Only the 16 first frames were usable … the remaining where completely black because of the dew

Lesson learned …

This image is a composite of 16 4′ exposures at f/4 and 100 ISO plus one 4′ black frame and a couple of 15″ and 20″ exposures at f/4 and 200 ISO where I light painted the ruin. They have been assembled using my Image Stacking Gimp script.

This year we rode to the Calern plateau where the Cote d’Azur observatory is located and where the light pollution is reduced to a level acceptable for astronomical observations.

We had a picnic with a couple of good friends and when the sky finally turned black, we laid down and watched dozens of shooting starts cross the sky.

While we enjoyed the show, my camera was clicking away next to one of the telescope domes which is sadly unused these days …

Some amateurs had brought their telescopes on the plateau and let us observe planets and constellations which was the icing on the cake.

This image is a composite of 23 4′ exposures at f/4 and 100 ISO plus one 4′ black frame and a 30″ exposure at f/4 and 200 ISO where I light painted the dome. Thy have been assembled using my Image Stacking Gimp script.

This is a 3 frame HDR processed with my home made script.

I sat there for a bit over an hour and a half, disturbed only by a couple of passing cars (which did the light painting of the barn for me ) and a family of wild boars in search for food in the neighbouring fields

You can see the light pollution produced by the industrial estate located a few kilometers away and honestly, I thought it would ruin the picture but in the end I think it turned out OK. I did set the white balance to Tungsten to try and compensate the orange hue I could see.

This image is a composite of 21 4 minutes exposures and one black frame that I put together using my home grown script.

While on vacation in my home town of Carqueiranne, in the south of France, I went to photograph the stone which is erected at the top of the hill of the Peno peninsula, looking out to the sea as a tribute to Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet who lived in this town.

In May 1896 the first aeroplane from Professor Charles Richet and Victor Tatin took off from this location and flew over the sea for about 140 meters. This was 7 years before the Wrights brothers launched their own aeroplane.

Technically speaking, this shot is a composite of 30 4′ shots + one 4′ dark frame and two 10″ shots where I light painted the stone with my flashlight. All the pictures are automatically layered in Gimp using a home grown script you can find here: Star Trail Image Stacking @ The Linux Darkroom