We live on Reunion Island and we’re so caught up in our daily lives and work that we forget that this place is just amazing and that we haven’t visited much of it. We tell ourselves we’ll do that later. That we’ll visit this place some other time… . In the end, we didn’t do anything. We decided to help the children discover the beauty of the place where they live. It’s a bit like Street Photography, where you’re always looking for something exotic and you can’t take photos where you live because it’s well known that the grass is greener elsewhere …  It’s always better somewhere else!

After our week at the seaside trolling and watching the whales, we went for a short hike in the Mafate cirque. Our first objective was to avoid the rain, as we have the annoying habit of ending our hikes completely cold and soaked to the skin.

A little anecdote. On Gwen’s first visit to Reunion Island, I took her to the island’s highest peak. The Piton des Neiges is 3070 m high. We slept at the gîte, which is 2500 m above sea level. We were due to wake up at 4am to do the rest of the climb to watch the sunrise. Of course, when we woke up, it was pouring down… Everyone looked at each other in the gîte and apart from 2 Belgians who went up, everyone went back to bed… 2 hours later, everyone was getting ready to head back down, including us. That’s when our 2 Belgians showed up and told us they were so happy because it had cleared up there and they’d been able to enjoy the show. I looked at Gwen and said: “Come on! Let’s get going. We’re just taking a bottle of water, our panchos and the camera ! Banzai !”

Well, we climbed out of the bone-chilling rain. We got up there in the rain and the wind and… nothing. We saw nothing at all… Bloody jokers, those Belgians ! We came back down to the gîte in the rain. We picked up our bags and continued the 3-hour descent in the rain… It was a complete mess. Gwen fell ill after that. Two years ago, we went to Mafate and the climb back up was terrible: 5 hours in the rain, wading through pools of mud and trying to keep our balance on slippery stones…

In short, I was a bit apprehensive about the poor weather conditions for this walk. On the D day, it rained in Saint-Denis. It rained during the 2-hour drive to the start of the trail. Fortunately, at the start, the pass we were going over was damp, but there was no rain. Just fog. I know the weather conditions here and I know that we’re going to start walking at an altitude of 2,000 m and descend to Aurère, which is 900 m above sea level. So the weather is going to get better ! And so it did. The walk was magnificent, with breathtaking scenery ! Apparently the Scout trail that takes us to Aurere is considered to be the most beautiful on the island. The cirque of Mafate is a hiker’s paradise. It’s a magnificent place with hundreds of kilometres of hiking trails. After spending a night there, the climb back up the next day was very hard on the calves and thighs. My sister, who wanted to do the hike with us, pushed herself to the limit to get there. She has knee problems and is slightly overweight. But she managed ! We nicknamed her ” Golden Calf ” ! The ascent was made under a magnificent sun.

Most of the photos were taken with my smartphone. I realised that it was simpler and that I needed the ultra-wide angle to capture the beauty of the place. My Ricoh GRD IV must have a field of view of around 74°, whereas my One Plus Nord has a field of view of around 120°!

Later in the week, we went to visit a lava tunnel with the children. From the road, we could see the actual lava flow. The volcano has been experiencing its first eruption of the year for the past month, and the flow is less than 2 km from the road. We were able to observe the flow from a safe distance, and the glowing lava was even visible! For the visit to the lava tunnel, I opted for my Ricoh GRD IV with its adapter so that I could have a 21 mm lens with a better field of view. I’ve learnt my lesson from Mafate ! Go wide ! The results weren’t up to scratch. This was due to a flagrant lack of light. This was to be expected in an underground tunnel… I shot at ISO 800 and even then it was complicated.

One thing’s for sure, when there’s very good light, by which I mean sunshine, the smartphone with its tiny sensor like the Ricoh GRD IV does perfectly well, and frankly the quality is amazing. But as soon as there’s not enough light, the smartphone uses all sorts of tricks to give you a photo that’s pleasing to the eye, but when you look closer, it’s a mess of pixels. You realise that the algorithms are smoothing everything out (wax effect for the skin) to fill in the missing or degraded pixels. The Ricoh GRD IV does a much better job of this. There’s no contest ! You’ll get some noise and grain (digital), but not the shapeless swill of smartphones. So yes, smartphone photos are catchier, but nothing to do, they’re not up to the level of expert compacts. I think what tends to trick us about quality is the hyper-wide-angle focal length. As we’re not used to seeing this kind of photo, they immediately have a little wow factor. But put an adaptor on the Ricoh GRD IV to get to 21mm, and the effect is the same. The same applies if you mount an ultra-wide-angle lens on a camera ! For each photo, you’ll have the camera information so you can make up your own mind. Here’s even a comparison of 100% enlarged photos.

As a bonus, here’s a small macro shot of a shrew on the Scout trail down to Aurère. Just to show you that when the beast isn’t moving fast, I’m not as one-armed as all that!

So these are our adventures on Réunion Island ! It’s an island bursting with things to do. Do you know of places with lush vegetation, beaches, hundreds of kilometres of hiking trails, breathtaking waterfalls, a volcano that’s still active and hundreds of whales that come during the austral winter ? All this on an island of just 2500 km² ! Frankly, there’s a lot to do and we haven’t even got round to it yet ! Here’s a video I saw recently on Arte that made me say : “Wow Gwen, we should go there !”

  All the photos were made with the Ricoh GRD IV and the One Plus Nord.

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Last week, for the first time in a long time, I spent some time in Saint-Denis. It was a strange feeling to be in the streets. It was crowded, but I wasn’t really comfortable and I was even rather clumsy! I felt like I had jumped back several months. Nothing is taken for granted on the street. This is the first time in 6 years that I have gone several weeks without taking photos. So despite the difficulties I experienced, I still enjoyed being in the city with my Ricoh GR3 on my wrist. Even if I haven’t been able to walk the streets yet, on Saturdays with a lot of people, it was quite busy with Christmas shopping. Here are a few photos I took last week.

If I had to make one resolution for 2023, it would be to go back to taking pictures a little more regularly. I still have this fear of not wanting to do it anymore. Not the fact that I’ve done the trick, because that would be pretentious after just six years of practice between Aix-en-Provence and Saint-Denis. But that it’s me who’s done it and that I’m no longer interested. In short, we’ll see. In the meantime I leave you with my 12 photos that I have selected for this year 2022. Even if my work was interrupted in July, it still represents this year. I wish you all a happy holiday season and I’ll see you next year!

TWELVE

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What troubles me most is that I don’t miss street photography. On the rare occasions when I found myself in the city, I happily took out my camera, but when I stayed at home, I had no desire to go out and take pictures. No desire to go wandering around tirelessly doing what I thought was such an important duty of documentation. I am now wondering if I was wrong all along. Had I not thrown myself wholeheartedly into Street Photography for the wrong reasons? If I thought it was so important, like breathing, how come I’ve become so detached from it?

There is one thing I must confess. For a long time I tried to convince myself that it was because I loved people, that I empathised with them and their situations, that I did Street Photography. This is a lie. I never argue in the street. I never interact with anyone. I started that way because it was a way to give myself some legitimacy and to overcome my fear of photographing people. By interacting with them, I sort of got their consent. But for several years now. I only consider people as compositional elements in my photographs. Of course I am on the lookout because I know people’s reactions. I can anticipate what is going to happen and that is essential to capture gestures. This is what makes me doubt my real motivation in the street. I realise that what I do is very selfish. Everything I do is because I think it’s beautiful and it’s because I enjoy it that I do Street Photography.

The last time I was in the car, I was listening to a programme about old age. And there were some interesting things. For example, “At what age are we considered old”? In the world of high-level sport, it’s 25 years old. In the professional world, it’s 45… And in Street Photography? When are we old? I feel like I’m already old personally… Well, I’m 49 and I’ve already got 6 years of Street Photography behind me. I wonder if I haven’t grown up too fast in Street Photography. So much so that I’m getting tired of it today. I sincerely hope that this is just a temporary condition…

I’m even old in the way I approach the practice. Who nowadays still shoots in RAW? Who has absolutely no presence on social networks? I’m even thinking that it was better before with the Photo Clubs where we exchanged and discussed photos face to face without the filter of social networks, hidden behind our screen. With that, I said everything. It’s an old man’s reflex to say: “it was better before…”. I feel like I’m not living in the right era. Even the way I see Street Photography takes me back years. I hate all these new fashions in Street Photography that make all these insipid photo festivals happy. I like the banality of the street, I just like to capture insignificant moments in the street.

I don’t know what I mean by writing this Blog. What I do know is that there are lots of different reasons to do street photography. And also a lot of reasons not to do it or not to want to do it anymore. I wonder a lot about what would make me keep walking the same streets with my Ricoh on my wrist. I’ll leave you with a slideshow of the photos I haven’t shown in the last few months. Very uneven work. Hard to be consistent when you spend so little time in the street…

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I feel like I’ve come full circle. I know very well that the street always offers different things to photograph, but a feeling of repeating myself and going in circles. Street Photography is also a state of mind and clearly I’m not into it. Let me reassure you right away, there are no particular worries in my life. Everything is going pretty well. My wife Gwen has finally got her work contract. The boys have started their school year well. As for me, I have my usual routine. A routine where photography is excluded for the moment.

I still snap from time to time, but I am far from being assiduous. To tell you the truth, when I have to wait for my kids at the end of the school day, I prefer to read in the car instead of hanging out with my camera. Something that seemed unthinkable a few months ago. I’ve looked through the pictures I’ve taken in the last 3 months and it’s not so good. The lack of dedication shows in my work. Nevertheless, there is something that stands out. My recent photos almost all have a common denominator. They show a reaction to a given situation. For me this is the purest form of street photography. I’m sharing with you some of the pictures I made in the last 3 months.

All the photos were made with the Ricoh GR3

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Since I’m not on social networks anymore, these photographers are the only openings I have to the world of street photography. I don’t make the effort to go and see what’s out there because I don’t know where to go. Sometimes I hear the name of an interesting photographer and I go and see his work. The only one who impresses me with his diligence and dedication to Street Photography is Alex Coghe ! Yes, I talk about him a lot, but frankly he’s got a lot going for him. I don’t think there is anyone else on the web who is as prolific as he is. And yet his articles are often of high quality and give us food for thought about the practice.

I tried for a while to do something like him with my sensibility, my approach, my vision, but little by little, a weariness set in. I am proud of some of the articles I wrote. Even when I reread them today, I tell myself that frankly, what I wrote was damn good ! Some will say that I lack modesty… For several months, or even several years now, my Blog has taken a more personal turn and I rarely deal with purely Street Photography themes. Simply because I have done the trick. I have nothing more to say about it.

As I have often said, I have drawn a lot of inspiration from social networks. The behaviours of the people who use these platforms are a mine for blog posts. There was also the discovery of Street Photography and all the themes associated with it. I even tried to contribute to a definition of Street Photogtraphy ! Today I have nothing more to say about it. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I’m above all that. I have strong ideas about some things like not making people pose and that light/shadows is lazy work…

I don’t pretend to be a voice that has any value in the microcosm of Street Photography. I play by my own rules. No dogma. Too restrictive and boring. In the past month I have hardly done any Street Photography. I went to South Africa for two weeks and brought back countless animal pictures ! I thought very little about Street. It was a family holiday and the Ricoh GR3 was hardly used. This is the only street photo I took in South Africa. It was on the first day as I was picking up our rental car.

Since then I’ve come back home and I’ve been to Saint-Denis twice. The children are still on holiday for 10 days and there is no hurry. For a long time I thought I had to insist when inspiration ran out. For a long time I thought I had to keep going out to take photos until it came back. It was the same with writing. Keep writing, even crap, to keep the momentum going. But now I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. Everyone goes through phases where it’s harder to do certain things. In this case for me it’s taking pictures and writing. I think it’s normal to feel more like it. You shouldn’t force things. Just put them aside and come back to them later.

It’s a bit like reading. For many years I read a lot and then when the children came into my life. I stopped. I didn’t feel like it anymore and yet I love it. For a few months now, I have started reading again and I am devouring books again. What is certain is that I continue to take photos. Probably less than at certain times. As for writing, it’s more complicated. As I said, I don’t have much more to say and I’m not going to insist on churning out air. I’ll write when I have things to say. It won’t be anything important but just ideas to share.

I think you have to accept the lack of inspiration, the fact that you don’t want to spend hours in the street, that you don’t see anything interesting to photograph. Basically, accept the lows as well as the highs. It’s part of the game. Things will come back on their own and if they don’t, then you’ve really done the trick. This is not the first time, nor the last time I’m sure, that I’ve experienced this lack of inspiration. Very often it coincides with the long school holidays when the balance is upset by the children.

Today’s truth will certainly not be tomorrow’s. I may start writing frantically again in the next few weeks ! For the time being, I think I’ll be posting more sparingly. The problem is that since I left YouTube, I don’t have the opportunity to share some of the pictures. I’ll just try to post them in an article. They are not Glory shots anyway…

All the pictures were made with the Ricoh GR3.

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Very often, my wanderings stop at the Petit Marché bus stop. It’s almost an obligatory stop when I go to Saint-Denis to take photos. When I was taking pictures in Aix-en-Provence, I loved spending time near the Belfry at the bottom of Gaston de Saporta. It was my very own corner. It was also the entry point to the city centre of Aix and the crossroads of several streets. I took countless photos there. I could feel the heart of the city beating there. Here in Reunion, the configuration is different. The street Maréchal Leclerc, this big artery passes right in front of the bus stop and that’s all. But for me it is the heart of Saint-Denis!

It’s not the most glamorous place. It is rather dirty and there is a rather idle population living on the streets and unfortunately drinking alcohol at a time when a café would be more appropriate. But it’s not a dangerous place. There are a lot of people and at no time do you feel unsafe. That’s my feeling now, but I have to say I was apprehensive about this corner of the city when I started documenting the streets of Saint-Denis. Like all entry points to cities, there is a lot of traffic. People come to do their shopping or to go home. Young people come to school and go home at the end of the afternoon. In short, a permanent coming and going that gives life to this place. This is the first thing that makes me come back to this place to take pictures.

The second thing is this feeling that I haven’t yet managed to capture the essence of this place. I’m going to go back to Provence for a while, where I spent more than 20 years. I’m going to talk about Cézanne. A well-known figure in Aix-en-Provence, but who also acquired a reputation that goes beyond the city of Aix-en-Provence. I am not comparing myself to Cézanne. I don’t have that pretension. I am not an Artist, I am just someone who observes his fellow human being… Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire tirelessly throughout his life. This granite block well known to the people of Aix. I climbed this mountain many times when I lived in Provence. It was the symbol of the city. Cézanne must have painted this mountain many times for different reasons than I tirelessly photograph this bus stop at the Petit Marché. But I tell myself that there is nothing wrong with wanting to photograph the same place over and over again. It’s a bit like my own Sainte-Victoire …

This is the last photo I took here 2 weeks ago. Am I satisfied with this picture ? Yes, definitely. But I will come back again and again to the Petit Marché stop. Maybe I’ll rename it Sainte-Victoire Station from now on !

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Last Sunday, I dragged my little family to Saint-Gilles. It is the beginning of the holidays for my boys. They are anticipating the winter holidays by two weeks. Joachim is at college and his school is the centre for the BEPC exam for the 9th grade. So he is invited to stay at home. Ronan could have continued to go to school until the 9th of July, but to avoid him sulking for the next two weeks, it was agreed that they would both stop school at the same time. So we went to the beaches because there was an event I didn’t know about. It was the Grand Boucan. It’s our carnival made in Reunion.

The main street of this small seaside town is full of people waiting for the parade of chariots and people dressed up. We arrived quite early because the roads are closed and we wanted to park easily. At the end of the morning, we went to eat in a small restaurant on the port before going to see the festivities. This is where the famous waiting game started. The endless waiting under a blazing sun (even if it’s austral winter here). The more the minutes passed, the denser the crowd became. I abandoned my little family to go and take some pictures. Pictures of people waiting. It’s a bit like a giant bus stop. A bus stop that must have been 500 m long!

It’s quite captivating to see people waiting. Well, when you put it like that, out of the context of Street Photography, it may sound strange, even weird… But my fellow Street Photographers know what I am talking about! It is a multitude of small scenes that unfold in front of my eyes. And this crowd ! Oh my God, it felt so good. I’m not used to seeing so many people. Even at the last trade fair in the streets of Saint-Denis, there weren’t that many people. So I was over the moon! I had to walk the streets twice in search of interesting sceneries.

And it is not necessarily obvious. It is difficult to extract clean, legible scenes from the chaos of the street. Like it is not easier with a lot of people. Yes, I know I’m boring. Few people and I complain that nothing is happening and then lots of people and I complain too because it’s not easy to take pictures… I’m not so close to a contradiction ! But it’s still better to have raw material. That was the case that day. It’s up to me to order this chaos to be able to make photos.

The wait was interminable and although we could see the floats in the distance, they were not moving fast and we gave up and went for an ice cream. We tried to come back to see the procession afterwards, but the crowd was even denser than before and it was impossible to see anything. This is where I took the most interesting photo of the afternoon. It was a photo that I didn’t look for, but it just came to me.

We walked back to the car without seeing anything. We were not more disappointed than that. We had come for the atmosphere and we were served. I had been able to take a few photos of the people in costume who were going to be part of the procession before the parade started.

While the children were on a pee break, I saw this scene which gave me my second favourite photo of the day. In the end, these two photos are carnival-related, but not the kind of photos you expect to see when you say you’re going to document the event. We’re more into backstage photos. That’s what I prefer in the end. I didn’t come to photograph the parade. I was interested in the people. Again, if you’re not a street photographer, it’s hard to understand.

All the photos were made with theRicoh GR3.

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Since I have retired from any photo sharing platform, I no longer look at other people’s work. For over 4 years I looked at countless photos. I was blown away by some of the photos. Even more blown away by others.  But a certain weariness also set in because I realised that it was a race for sensationalism. It had become a race to the top. More and more. This is especially true for the photos that are sent in for competitions.

You know what ? Nothing has changed since I left … It’s this overkill that annoys me. I realise that these kinds of photos generate an instant emotion in me [Waouhh!!] but that it quickly fades. Why is that? These photos always have the same style calibrated for competitions. Juxtapositions, superpositions, burlesque photos, photos that play with colour… In short, yes, these photos are pleasing to the eye, but in the end it’s just like social networks. We look at them, we smile and [Next!] we move on to the next one …

I’m not interested in this kind of photography anymore because for several years now, I’ve had a more documentary approach to the street. I realise that I have a very old school vision of Street Photography. I photograph very ordinary and mundane scenes simply because the street is like that 99% of the time. Sometimes something unusual or extraordinary happens. I just try to be a bit creative with my composition, but I don’t try to make pictures that look like surrealist paintings. I’m very keen on the documentary side of things.

All the photos were taken with the Ricoh GR3. For some reason, the quality of the photos in the Blog is quite poor. You can click on the photo to get a better quality in the thumbnail that will open.

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This week I rediscovered the GR3. The first thing I am happy about is its performance at high ISO! Even in alleys with little light, I was able to keep the aperture at f8 and the shutter speed at 1/800s. I often happily exceeded ISO 5000 and the colour was still correct. On the other hand, the AF slips quite a bit. Yes, I often use the AF with the Ricoh because I also have the Snap which is zone focusing that I set to 1.5m. It’s the plus of the GR series. You can use AF and zone focusing at the same time. I may have to adjust the AF zone differently, but I found it weird going back and forth…

The camera always overheats. I always find it annoying … Oh yes, to take 300 pictures, I used 2 batteries ! It’s just scandalous as autonomy …  And yet, I don’t use the touch screen. I also had a weird thing when I was at the limit of the battery. The camera would turn itself off with the lens out. Kind of like a forced standby. But it’s kind of weird not to retract the lens. On my old Ricohs, when the battery runs out, the camera shuts down and retracts the lens. I don’t know if this is normal or if my camera has a defect. After I put in a new battery, the problem was no longer there.

I’m getting used to the layout of the shutter release and on/off buttons. I haven’t accidentally turned the camera off while taking pictures. This was not the case when I started using the GR3 3 years ago. The camera seems to me to be more fragile than the previous iterations though. Clearly, I am not yet comfortable with this camera in the streets of Saint-Denis.

The image quality is good and it feels like there is a lot of potential that I haven’t touched yet. Weeks and weeks of practice are needed to find its limits. The opening photo of this blog is a 2 year old photo that was lying around on the SD card. The last photo of this blog was taken yesterday while I was playing volleyball with Joachim.

All the photographs were made with the Ricoh GR3.

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So what? I start looking for another GRD IV? At the risk of coming across another camera with problems? No, I’m going to keep it simple. I have a lot of small cameras lying around at home. The easy solution would be to use my Fuji XF10 that I bought at the beginning of last year. For the record, I got it for 250€. That’s cheap. This camera is not particularly popular with street photographers, but I had a blast with it. I had found the pleasure of my beginnings when I used Zone Focusing with my Fuji xE2 mounted with the 18mm f2. This was the same thing but with a camera the size of a Ricoh GR.

So no, the Fuji XF10 is out. In the future, I will surely use this camera, but for the moment I wanted to give the Ricoh GR3 another chance! It’s been almost 3 years since I was offered this camera. I’ve hardly taken any pictures with it and the last ones I found on the memory card are from July 2020! OMG ! 2 years this camera has been sleeping in a cupboard … My first feeling when I picked it up is that the right side of the camera is still overheating … Nothing has changed. I find the positioning of the power and shutter buttons still too close to each other. But I’ll try to ignore these flaws and try to make it my new tool on the street.

I need something new and also to challenge myself a bit. That’s why I’m switching to the GR3 for the moment. Nothing is definitive. If you have been following me since the beginning, I have been between the Fui XE2, the Ricoh GRD IV, the Ricoh GR, the Fuji XF10 and now the GR3! There is one camera I keep coming back to.  It is the GRD IV. But what I have found in my journey is that changing cameras has been very important in my work and allows me to break a certain routine. I am a fan of routine and find it comfortable, but sometimes change is good. Last year when I switched to the XF10 for almost 9 months, I rediscovered colour. I don’t know what will happen with the GR3, but I want to give it another chance.

This camera was given to me by some very close friends whom I left in Mainland France. The least I could do was to use it. Don’t think that the photos that illustrate this Blog were taken with the GR3! No, the good old GRD IV was used. The GR3 is now in my bag, but I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in the street yet…

All the photos were made with the Ricoh GRD IV.

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