Three Days in a Strange Place — Part 1: A Stormy Start at the Clue de Barles
- Sylvain Petit
- Jul 31
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 4
Watch Part 1 on YouTube:
Some trips announce themselves gently. This one arrived in a downpour. I had a four-day long weekend and a simple studio booked a few hours south of home, in the Barles country of Haute-Provence — a corner of the French Alps I'd been wanting to explore properly. I'd pictured mountain hikes. What I got, at least to begin with, was rain.
But rain isn't the enemy of landscape photography that people think it is. So when I passed a dramatic roadside canyon, I pulled over, swapped into rubber boots, and scrambled down to find a composition. The water was too deep to wade, so I worked the edges, looking for movement in the foreground and those clean vertical rocks behind.
It was also the perfect excuse to finally use a lens I'd just bought: a Laowa 9mm, fully manual, absurdly wide. My usual 12mm wasn't quite swallowing the scene, so out came the new toy! I'm not used to a lens this wide — composing for it is a different skill, and I'll admit I fumbled at first — but eventually I landed on a frame I really liked. Then the wind picked up, the sky opened, and I ran for the car.
Later I pushed toward a rock formation I'd seen online — a hike I was excited for — but the rain came back harder than ever, like standing under a shower, and after twenty minutes I gave up, soaked. "I'll come back some other day," I told the camera, not knowing yet that I would.
A morning to myself
The next morning rewarded the patience. I reached my cozy little basecamp, dried my gear (badly), and headed out early to a narrow gorge full of small waterfalls. No trail markers, no other cars, the whole place to myself. Soft light filtered through the trees, and I worked slowly: a square frame, then a wider one for more water, polariser and black mist out, closing down the aperture until the shutter speed gave the water just the texture I wanted. Quiet, unhurried — exactly the kind of morning that makes it all worth it!
The trip was only getting started. In Part 2, the weather clears and the landscape turns strange!
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