Photographers in Tours & the Loire châteaux

Tours is where people actually stay when they come for the châteaux, and it earns a session of its own before anyone gets in the car. The old quarter around the Place Plumereau is a full square of fifteenth-century half-timbering with café terraces filling the middle of it; the lanes off it — Rue du Grand Marché, Rue Briçonnet, the Place Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier — are quieter and give the same timber and tuffeau stone without the tables. Ten minutes east, the Cathédrale Saint-Gatien puts up a flamboyant west front between two towers finished in the Renaissance, and the little Cloître de la Psalette beside it is a calm, arcaded courtyard almost nobody walks into. The Loire itself is two minutes further: long gravel banks, the Pont Wilson's stone arches, and the widest sky in the city, which is the reason evening sessions end here. Then the châteaux. Villandry, fifteen kilometres west, is not really about the house — it is six terraced gardens, an ornamental kitchen garden laid out in coloured squares of vegetable, box hedges and a water mirror above them, at their fullest from June to October. Azay-le-Rideau, a little further on, is a small Renaissance château standing in its own reflection on an island in the Indre, ringed by a wooded park. Both are ticketed, both set their own rules for professional photography and drone work, and both are far quieter in the first hour after opening — check the current conditions before a shoot is promised inside the gates.