Bob’s Pics

Plancher Bas is the village in France from which my wife comes. It’s an okay sort of place, nothing spectacular. It’s pretty rural and there’s a smell of woodsmoke in the air in the winter. The road through it doesn’t really lead anywhere, though it does by-pass the centre of the village (what you can see here) on the way to Plancher Les Mines. Still the traffic on that road has doubled or tripled in the fifteen years I’ve been going there. The village centre, on the other hand, remains fairly quiet most of the time, as you can see.

Unfortunately, my in-laws live next to the busy main road, which means there isn’t much of a view from their windows, and the noise of the traffic can be a bit of a pain in the arse in the summer, when you want to sit with the terrace windows open in order to catch a breeze. I think if you live there you stop noticing.

My wife has relatives who live up the road in a nearby village called Auxelles Bas, and their places are much more like it: a long way back from the main road, fantastic views across the countryside, and only the whine of an occasional power tool to disturb the peace.

You can get away from the main road in Plancher Bas, too, and we often walk round the village. I take my camera along and occasionally snap a shot, but these days it has to be something exceptional to make me want to take one. This particular photo isn’t one of the special ones, but it’s an example of how the strange (for me, 15 years ago) can become familiar. This church, the view down the road towards the town hall where we were married, the hills behind where the fireworks go off in the summer.

The year we were married, the weather was so bad on the 14th of July that the fireworks were postponed until later in the month, the weekend we happened to arrive for our wedding. It made it seem like a special occasion.

I’ve corrected this one in Photoshop for distortion of the verticals. It was a very cold day, too cold to snow, as they say, and this was a 1/200th of a sec exposure at f5.0, ISO 50.