Hi everyone,

I’m really excited for our French adventure.

We’ll be in two vastly different shooting situations, city landscapes and street photography in Paris and action shots in the Camargue. In the city I love the dusk, blue hour and night shots, so a tripod is a must. Street scenes don’t require a tripod, especially since we’ll do a good amount of walking and riding the Metro. I still like to carry a full complement of lenses so I usually have my photo backpack with me. If you have one street lens, that may suffice. You never know when it's going to rain in Paris, so I always carry a light rain coat or small umbrella. Comfortable walking shoes are needed.

Then come the action photos. We will literally be walking in marshes while wearing hip waders, the waders will be provided. We won’t walk a great distance in the waders but it can be a little mucky in places. You won’t want to use a tripod while photographing the horses or bulls but you might when we go to bird sanctuary. 

While in the marshes and beaches a 70-200mm lens is recommended. That is the longest I had the first time I photographed there and there were a few times I wished I had a longer lens, so the last time I used a 100-500mm. It is much harder to shoot horses running at you with the longer lens, so I think it is a matter of your comfort level. If you regularly use a longer lens and can hand hold it, I’d say go for it. If you are uncertain, stick with something in the 70-200mm range. You’ll also want a zoom in the 24-105mm range for when we are mingling with the horses or they are resting between runs. I highly suggest having an identical second camera so you don’t need to switch lenses in the surf. Having a backup camera is a good idea on any trip. 

You’ll want to make sure your camera is set up for your focus to track. If you don’t know how to do that, research it now. Then practice before you go. If you don’t have any wildlife nearby to practice with, go to a street where cars are going about 25mph. Shoot a ton of photos of the cars driving toward you and then download them to your computer and see if the headlights are staying in focus. You don’t want to try to figure everything out when we are in France.

We’ll be standing in a line with the horses running at us in some situations. We need to stay close to each other so a horse doesn’t try to run between us. If you are on the end of the line you’ll probably get splashed, so I wear a light raincoat. We won’t be at ground level for the bulls, they aren’t as friendly as the horses. For the bulls we’ll be up on a trailer where they can’t get us.

As a reminder, we have our Zoom meeting Sunday at 7:00 p.m. EDT. It will be recorded if you can’t make it. We’ll go over some last minute things and answer any questions you may have. Here's the link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88989201828?pwd=k94HKoTFVEJ7YDmapgZH4A6vLqLCDF.1

Meeting ID: 889 8920 1828

Passcode: 432268

If you have any questions before Sunday, just let me know. Otherwise I’ll see you Sunday.

Loren