Wedding photographer at the Domaine de la Baratonne
I document weddings, and the Baratonne stands out for a detail few estates offer: its rooms join together or separate depending on the day the couple have imagined, and the reportage adapts to it.
It is an eighteenth-century bastide at La Garde, between Hyères and Toulon, in the middle of a working vineyard. The oldest buildings date from 1735, and the restoration had the wisdom to leave them as they were. You arrive along a tree-lined drive. In front, a formal garden and its fountain. Beyond, the vines climb towards the hills, beneath plane trees and olive trees.
The glasshouse faces east
Which means natural light you can use until early evening, and artificial light after that.
East is the right orientation for a reception. The room is lit without baking all afternoon, and the light stays soft where a south-facing glasshouse would harden around four o'clock. A dinner served before the changeover is photographed in daylight. Everything after it belongs to a different exercise, and knowing at what hour that changeover falls on a given date is most of the preparation.
After it, I compose my light. Off-camera flashes around the room, where the ambient lighting has grace and little power. The ISO stays low, the grain stays fine, the colours stay true.
The formal garden, from the air
A formal French garden is built on symmetry, and symmetry is read from above.
At ground level, you see hedges. From height, you discover the pattern the garden was drawn to make, the fountain at its centre, and two figures somewhere in that geometry. It is one of the rare settings where an aerial view adds a reading, as opposed to a simple gain in height.
I hold a remote pilot licence, and this is precisely the case the drone is for: two or three wide views of a place whose form reveals itself only from the sky.
On the ground, the same garden works from an angle. Head on, it composes an arranged portrait. From three-quarters, it gives depth.
The rooms that answer one another
The interior spaces form a single volume, or separate to hold several moments at once. That configuration belongs to the couple, and I know it a week ahead to prepare my angles.
What do the plane trees give in summer?
Shade, at the hour when most Var estates have none. Guests gather beneath them of their own accord, and a cocktail hour photographed under the plane trees keeps a detail in the faces that the same hour in full sun erases.
Beyond that, the estate lets itself be worked. Access is simple, parking is ample, and the layout of the place goes along with a photographer moving through the day.
Lawrence Banahan, documentary wedding photographer in Toulon, Hyères and on the French Riviera. Domaine de la Baratonne, La Garde.