The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

After morning class yesterday (critiques of photos from each of the fourteen photographers on the workshop) we were bussed to Montepulciano. The idea was not so much to shoot the moderately pretty town, but to find some lunch. The midday sun does not make for attractive cityscapes.

I chatted with a couple of young Canadian ladies I met at lunch. They were doing a cycling tour in the Tuscan heat. I persuaded them that they should take the opportunity of meeting a group of photographers to pose for some portraits. They warmed rapidly to the idea and after I made some pictures of them, my colleagues shot them posing with their bicycles. 

Then we bussed on to the pretty little town of Pienza to shoot in the better light of late afternoon. It was still too harsh for me and I had a couple of beers in the shade while my more enthusiastic class mates flattered locals into posing. One enthusiastic subject in his eighties really got into it and it was amusing to watch the resulting photo shoot over my beer from a distance. 

Then we bussed to a series of three locations to shoot Tuscan landscapes, enlivened by the presence in the foreground of Natalie, our resident model. She's a dancer by profession and risked limb if not life doing balletic leaps in cornfields as our shutters fired like muted machine guns. 

This went in so long that dinner back at the hotel was at 9.30pm. Rather than retire sensibly to bed I ended up falling asleep in my chair with my computer in my lap, having failed to complete my edit. I woke early in the morning and finished the job of identifying ten "selects" from the hundreds of shots taken.