Fotografi a Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a fortified village on a ridge in the hills behind Nice, and it is small enough to walk end to end in ten minutes — which is exactly why it works as a session and exactly why it fills up. The ramparts are the frame that sells it: François I's sixteenth-century wall still runs the whole circuit, and the path around it opens on one side to the Alps and on the other to the sea beyond Cagnes, with the Bastion du Dauphin at the north end giving the widest view. Inside, the Rue Grande climbs from the Porte Royale past the Grande Fontaine — a heavy urn-shaped fountain in a tiny vaulted square that is the most photographed corner of the village — and carries on between stone houses, vaulted passages and gallery windows to the cemetery at the far end, where Marc Chagall is buried. Outside the walls the hillside is old olive terraces and cypresses, and the road up to the Fondation Maeght runs through them; the classic view back at the village, ramparts above and silver leaves below, is from that side. The Maeght itself is a pine-shaded modern art foundation with a Giacometti courtyard and a Miró labyrinth, ticketed and with its own rules for professional shoots — check before booking it into a session. Timing is the whole game here: coach groups arrive from mid-morning and the Rue Grande becomes single-file, so the working windows are the first hour after sunrise and the last hour of light, when the stone goes warm and the village empties out again.