Snap Decision

Can our man Mike Peake and his point-and-shoot camera cut it among the keen amateurs on a photography holiday in Biarritz? Trust us, if he can, so can anyone…

It's not every day that a manhole catches your eye. Unless you work in construction or get a perverse kick out of thinking there could be lost civilizations down there, you could walk over thousands of these heavy, grey metal slabs and not give them a second thought. But here i am, lying in the road, staring straight at this monolithic subterranean gateway, admiring its beauty. "Ville de Biarritz" is written on the top, and it's the best thing i've seen in the last five minutes.

The aperture of the camera i have borrowed is set to F4.5, which i now know is the setting you need to take a photo where only one tiny part of your subject is sharply in focus. It's where photography meets art, and i've secretly always wanted to know how to do it. I click and smile in a knowing way as a couple of Australian tourists walk past, giving me a wide berth. It's OK, i've not fallen, my Antipodean friends, i've just caught the photography bug.

Forty-one-year-old Jonathan Chritchley exudes that self-confident cool that all good snappers do. When he meets me and the other students at our beach-side hotel in this delighful pocket of south-west France he's wearing flip flops and a smile. Jonathan has been running photography holidays in Biarritz, 10km from his home, since 2006, and over half of his protégés return. Although 70% of his students are women, the current week-long course - which i am participating on for two days - is solely comprised of men. Ther's 40-something Jeremy, a former chartered accountant, who quit his job to pursue a life long dream of being a photographer; solicitor Peter, 65, an 18-month-long convert to the pursuit of better pictures; and “The Irishman”, who is by his own admission the least experienced of the three. Then there’s me, with an €80 point-and-shoot digital camera in my hand.

Bolt-on lenses and manual shutter functions it does not have, although my host and the other students go easy on my lack of armaments, and in a special moment reminiscent of those movies where the cowboy hands his son his very first gun, Jonathan lends me a digital SLR camera – a Nikon, no less. In 10 minutes I know how to use it, sort of. This is going to be fun.

It’s 7.20am on the first day, after yesterday’s briefing, and the ocean is grumbling beneath us. One of Jonathan’s great skills as a photographer is an ability to find terrific things to shoot and, while the sliver of beach we’re on doesn’t look much, he assures us this picture is a banker. We’re inclined to believe him as his portfolio is mesmerising, and it’s nice to note that he is refreshingly forthcoming about the techniques he employs in his own work, all of which is ocean or landscape photography.

A small clump of rocks slowly reveal themselves in the ebb tide, and as the sun shines through cracks in the dark clouds above us, the grin on our mentor’s face broadens. Bright sunlight and blue skies are not what photographers covet at all – they love clouds, the darker and moodier the better.

We’re reminded of the “rule of thirds”, which has served artists well for centuries. The idea is that the composition in photographs is improved if you try to position the main objects in your images one third of the way up or down, and one third of the way in.

Here, that means a clump of rocks on the left, a dash of sea at the bottom, and lots of sky. I take 78 photos from slightly different angles in less than an hour, and I’m controlling the shutter speed, aperture, focus and everything. I even manage to work the tripod without incident – except when I hand it to Jonathan at a small harbour later on and it snaps shut on his finger. This is exactly like the time I accidentally burned the hand of Metallica’s drummer with a cigarette, and I imagine the only worse thing I could do to a photographer would be to poke him in the eye.

I apologise meekly and shuffle off to get some close-ups that are “representative of where we are” – a stunning mix of Nice-esque chic and old-school charm, where surfer-friendly beaches rub shoulders with rocky outcrops. So getting shots of boat paraphernalia and anchors is going to be a doddle, and it’s not long after that I find myself face down on the pavement looking at that manhole. You’ll have to believe me, but it really was something else.

To record the difference in quality between an SLR camera and my own machine, I whip out the point-and-shoot whenever I remember, trying to replicate the shots we’ve just taken. Nowhere does this turn out to be a better idea than on the morning of day two, at the most beautiful, misty lake I have ever seen.

The images on the screen of my borrowed SLR look amazing, but the ones on my own camera look pretty good, too. And after a quick play with my computer’s junior school-quality photo manipulation tools a few days later, some of the pictures turn into something I never dreamed I had in me. The SLR ones – even if I do say so myself – are staggering.

I ask Jonathan why, if all five of us were to line up cameras and take identical shots, his would be the best. He says it may not be, but does admit that his knowledge of digital enhancement would give him the edge. Ah, but isn’t photo manipulation just cheating? Not so says our teacher, explaining that in past times the best film photographers would spend an age during the printing process physically blocking out bits of light as the projector beamed the image down onto the photo paper.

It helped them to lighten and darken different areas, and Adobe’s ubiquitous Photoshop is the modern equivalent. And all you are actually doing is enhancing whatever is already there.

I’m a sceptic until I see my beach shot from yesterday transformed in under five minutes. Most of Jonathan’s courses involve at least the rudiments of digital enhancement, and for me it’s truly enlightening. Addictive, too – when I eventually get home, I spend the first of what I suspect will be many hours happily converting average family shots into absolute crackers.

For now, though, we’re lost in the beauty of the lake, its wooden jetty, and the early morning mist. The others are like kids on Christmas Day, and I can’t recall feeling this odd mixture of excitement and inner calm in a long time. The day brightens, the mist intensifies and the shots just keep getting better. And this, I think to myself, is what photography is really all about.

VISIT WWW.OCEANCAPTUREADVENTURES.COM FOR MORE DETAILS. STAY AT LE GRAND LARGE RESIDENCE, WWW.LEGRANDLARGE-BIARRITZ.COM

TOP 3

tips for better pics

1. Know your kit. Many keen amateurs with SLRs and a selection of lenses waste precious time trying to remember what goes where and end up missing the shot.

2. Look behind you. You may be photographing an awe-inspiring mountain, but there could be an even better view over your shoulder.

3. Keep it simple. In landscape photography in particular, it’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.