One of the great things about living in France is the great food. France is renowned for its cuisine, but it’s not until you spend some time here that you really appreciate just how engrained it is into the very fabric of French culture.
Each region of France has its own specialities to offer, a tradition that brings water to this photographer’s mouth just thinking about it…
A village a few kilometers from here, Chabeuil, is known for its Caillette, a sort of ball of pork based paté (I daren’t ask more) that’s served warm with bread and salad. Believe me, it’s delicious…
Anyway, I digress. The point of this post is that Chabeuil holds an annual Caillette Fair where the different farms get to show off their Caillette making prowess, and each year the local camera club is asked to put on a small exhibition of pig photos (as you do). For a bit of fun I thought I’d offer my services.
I asked a friend of mine to assist and we drove to the local mountains to visit a free-range pig farm. The farmer thought we were bonkers, but he was nevertheless happy to let us “endulge our desires”, so we put our wellies on and set to work.
It turns out that taking photos of pigs isn’t as easy as one might think. Pigs are curious by nature, and everytime I’d bend down to take a photo I’d have some pig either trying to sniff my camera, eat my bag or cover my shirt in s….
Also, I hadn’t appreciated just how big pigs could be. It turns out that up until this moment I’d only ever seen small pigs. Pigs can be much bigger than I’d ever imagined!
Even long range shots were hard; the pig that I was shooting may have been a fair distance away, but there would always be one of his friends wanting to say hello.
My “assistant” had her own problems to deal with. The ambiant light was flat so I wanted to add a little kick using off-camera flash. I’d given her a 580EX flash attached to an umbrella and a Pocket Wizard to set it off remotely, and her job was to get the umbrella as close to the subject as possible, from varying angles, as I was trying to take photos. Have you every tried to get a big white umbrella next to a pig without them noticing?
The Photo Fairies decided to help me out with this shot. I’d accidentally set my shutter speed above my maximum sync speed, and as a result half the frame is lit by ambiant light only, but the “Shadow” caused by the shutter really adds to this image by giving the impression of a shaft of light over the top half (which is really just given a kick by the flash).
One of the best pieces of lighting advice I’ve ever heard is that to create an interesting image, one shouldn’t light all of it.
Having gotten some long and medium range shots I decided to go for the wide angle. The pigs were happily eating from their troughs so I put on the 10-22mm and got the camera as close as I could – I was literally 2 to 3 centimeters away from the snout. Since I couldn’t get low enough to see through the viewfinder is was a very hit and miss approach, but I did manage to get this shot.
During the exhibition I constantly overheard amused parents explaining to their children that this is what they meant when they chastise them for eating like pigs!
Despite the challenges we had a lot of fun. The pigs were curious, and big, and definitely not clean, but they were gentle and amusing. I came back with an appalling hit-to-miss ratio, but I’m pleased with the ones that worked out. The public seemed to enjoy them anyway.
Here’s a couple more, to see you out the door. (I’m a poet!).
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