To celebrate my 5000th twitter. I think this is probably one of the best photographs I have ever and will ever take.

In 2004 – I think it was – that’s the date in the album anyway – I flew into Nice and hired a [...]]]> Before I found religion I mean kitesurfing, my holidays consisted of driving around France taking photographs. With an OM10 film camera and a few lenses that I’d scraped the money together to buy.

In 2004 – I think it was – that’s the date in the album anyway – I flew into Nice and hired a car and drove around Provence. Most people when they think of Provence; I don’t know what they think of. Peter Mayle possibly. Fields of lavender. I went to go to the Gorges du Verdon. I’d seen photographs of them years before but crucially did not know where or what they were so it was only by accident I saw them in an airline travel magazine and had a Eureka moment.

Anyway, today for other unrelated reasons I have been scanning old family photographs onto a computer, and when I had them done, I sneaked a few of my older landscape shots into the scanner. I fell on the album that had the pictures from Provence in them.

The cliffs are very high.

I can’t remember how high but I think 700 feet may have been mentioned. Anyway, when I arrived in Nice, the nice people in Hertz insisted on giving me a Mercedes A Class which I can tell you for nothing is hard to hill start on an Alp.

The first climbing photographs I ever took, I took the day I drove around the local route around the Gorges du Verdon. It’s a tiny road that has something in common with the scenic route from Camp to Dingle in Kerry; it’s terrifying. Along the route, however, I stopped because I saw lots of people looking over the edge.

This was why. There are things I shouldn’t admit about that scene so I won’t but it does involve the word abseiling. I now realise how utterly misguided I was.

At the farthest end of the drive, there’s this bridge across the gorge. When I first saw the picture in the guidebook, I thought it was wooden and pedestrian. I was wrong.

It’s concrete and you can drive across it. In fact, you have to if you want to continue around the route. Oh you can walk across it as well if you want – people insisted on doing so and therefore ruining my photographs. As it was film, you just waited. It was expensive to take photographs you knew for certain you didn’t want.

All of the photographs were taken with an Olympus OM10 and – judging by the pictures – Zuiko 50mm 1.8. I didn’t know a whole lot about photography at the time so a lot of the photographs are ever so slightly washed out.

I had issues with the scanner. It’s a Xerox that I have a few years, which was bought in XP days and the last time I tried, I couldn’t track down Vista drivers for it. Today I found them however, and the scanner is working now. This is good because I probably have about 3000 photographs in albums, some of which I’d like to scan.