Blog & guides

These are working notes rather than travel writing. Each guide is written by a photographer in the network who shoots the city or the subject it covers, and the questions they answer are the ones clients actually ask before a session: which hour a location is still empty, what a permit costs and whether you need one, what the weather does to a plan in February.

Several of them save real money. Photography rules in France vary by site and by commune — some châteaux and museums require written authorisation, drone work is restricted almost everywhere, and a commercial shoot on public land is not the same permission as a private one. Reading that before you book beats discovering it on the morning of the shoot.

Others are about timing, which is the thing people most often get wrong. Provence lavender has a window of a few weeks and it moves year to year. The tide decides what Mont-Saint-Michel looks like more than the forecast does. The Riviera in September is a different photograph from the Riviera in July, and quite a different crowd.

The practical guides — what to wear, what to expect from a corporate headshot day, what a château venue decides for you — are there because the same questions arrive in almost every enquiry. If yours is not answered here, ask us directly; the answer usually turns into the next article.