Framedlight

Leaving Derek's house in the morning we drove through Bourg-Saint-Maurice and up into the Iseran Valley towards the Col de l'Iseran. We unwittingly followed the Route des Grandes Alpes for nearly the whole time we were down in the mountains. This was a series of roads created by the French Touring Club and finished in 1937, starting in Geneva and ending in Menton on the Mediterranean coast. It opened the area up to tourism and allowed the local population to reach the outside world more easily. With the coming of the autoroutes these rather narrow and precipitous roads are fairly free of traffic. Alan wanted to cycle up to the Col de l'Iseran (2770m) so he left me and Hettie in upper Tignes, which was deserted apart from a few workmen who were engaged on the lifts and residences in village. There is something very depressing about a ski town in summer. The high rise accommodation is usually never that well designed and the mountainside looks a mess where the runs have been...

The farm where we were staying had it's share of abandoned barns and farm machinery which included an Audi Quattro, mouldering in a barn which had started to descend around it. We have stayed here a couple of times before and it has not improved any, so I think it may be too late to fire it up. The shack with 'private' written on it was 'the facilities'!

Not too far from where I live lie 3 corrugated iron barns, snuggled up close to each other and gradually sinking into dilapidation. In fact the third has been almost totally submerged by brambles. Every so often I have a go at photographing them and I have had a yen to try out some blends of colour shots and infrared shots. The day was quite dramatic and while  I was there the clouds rolled in followed by a thunderstorm. As I was leaving it started to rain torrentially. Needless to say under such conditions there was some gusting wind which affected the longer exposure infrared shots. I photographed the barns with and without a 650nm infrared filter on the front. The filter is from Japan and I don't think of particularly good quality, unlike the Hoya 720nm one I have. As the light was from behind the barn I bracketed my exposures so that I could make an HDR image or blend the exposures in photoshop if I needed to. I made a gentle HDR conversion of the first image which was not t...