The last two from Wind Mountain, which typically lives up to its name.

Image made with my Nikon FM.

Tags:   hike hikes hiking hikes of 2023 landscape forest woods gorge columbia river gorge pnw pacific northwest wind mountain mist moody fog ferns washington film analog nikon FM 35mm

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Eugene, Oregon, USA

Shot on film
Canon Prima Super 135 N

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Shadows and curves.

White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA.

Back in October, I took a trip to White Sands National Park in New Mexico, USA with my Flickr friend (and real friend!) Frank Loose. You can say all kinds of horrible things about social media - and you'd be right - but it can (and Flickr, in particular, can) be an amazing way to connect you with people with shared interests. Frank and I connected over ten years ago on Flickr and have become fast friends since then. We've been talking for years about doing a photo trip together and we finally did it in October this year when we travelled to New Mexico to photography White Sands. If you'd like to read about our trip, you're welcome to check out my blog post about it.

White Sands National Park covers about a third of a huge dunefield between the San Andres and Sacramento Mountains in southern New Mexico. White Sands is a bit of a misnomer, as the dunes are actually made of gypsum, not sand, and though they are white in bright sunshine they can take on some amazing colours – from beige to pink to blue – depending on the light conditions. Frank and I photographed the dunes over four days of morning and evening visits and really came to love this magical place. I hope you enjoy this series of images (and do check out Frank’s beautiful work as well!). If you'd like to see the whole series, take a look at my White Sands Album.


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Tags:   Dunes Gypsum Dunes New Mexico United States White Sands White Sands National Park

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Image made with my Nikon FM.

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A few days ago, at the beginning of December 2024, celebrations televised worldwide heralded the coming back to life of the Notre–Dame Cathedral in Paris, after the accidental and disastrous timber roof fire of April 2019. This joyous occasion was an opportunity to vaunt the vastness of the cathedral.

Well, today and over the following days, I invite you to discover a much-less known, but much more surprising, church, the abbey church of Pontigny, in the equally little known département of Yonne (a part of Burgundy), about 150 kilometers southeast of Paris. There, at the edge of a small village and framed by the tall trees of a dark forest, an enormous vessel of stone stands in the middle of wheat fields, towering above everything else, even though it doesn’t have towers nor spire...

It has two things in common with the cathedral of Paris: at 120 meters, the length of its nave almost that of Notre–Dame (130 meters), and in addition to being an abbey church, Pontigny is also a cathedral... It is also the oldest, as when the first stone of Notre–Dame was laid in 1163, Pontigny was already built.

The abbey of Pontigny was founded in 1114 by a group of monks led by Hugues of Mâcon. For the second time after the foundation of La Ferté the year before, monks of the Cîteaux Abbey left the mothership to found a new monastery. Pontigny thus became and will forever remain “the second daughter of Cîteaux”, an important claim in an order than will number more than 2,200 monasteries of monks and nuns.

Donations flow in. Counting more than a dozen Kings of France among its benefactors, not to mention a good half-dozen Kings of England, the abbey will also give refuge to three archbishops of Canterbury, two of them saints: Thomas Becket and Edme (or Edmund) of Abingdon, whose relics are still buried in the choir of the church.

Built largely thanks to generous funding by Thibaut the Great, Earl of Champagne whose daughter Adele will marry King Louis VII, the church we can still admire today is built between 1138 and around 1150, although additions will be made to it as late as the early 1200s. It is mostly Romanesque, but the influence of the Gothic style can be seen in the latest rows of the nave, and of course in the ceiling, which is rib-vaulted —the first time this architecture was ever used in Burgundy.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the abbey will be one of the richest and most powerful of the Western world, counting more than forty priories, vast lands and assorted properties in many different cities. Its library was also famous.

Listed as a Monument historique (Historic Landmark) on the very first list drawn up in 1840 by Minister Prosper Mérimée, the abbey church is almost all that’s left of the abbey, which was severely damaged during the Hundred Years War, then during the Wars of Religion, and finally during the French Revolution.

Since 1954, the abbey church is also the legal seat and headquarters of the “Mission de France” territorial prelature, which inspired the so-called “worker priests” which are quite well known in France. For that reason, the abbey church was granted by the Pope the status of cathedral of that prelature.

I’ve had the pleasure to visit this grandiose church, the largest ever in the Cistercian order, in late May 2024, within the scope of a photographic mission for the Fondation pour La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français, one of the not-for-profit organizations I work for as a pro bono photographer. I was given access to what’s left of the cloister, a part which is normally off-limits.

They praise the light in Notre–Dame of Paris, but what about the Romanesque light in this abbey church-cum-cathedral?

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