FirstLight

A soft, rich light fills the crevices of Gimont like melting butter on a coarse slice of warm French bread. Some newly forged photo comrades and I eagerly soak in this early morning glow as we explore the weekly market stalls setting up in the 13th-century town's large, sheltered square.

The southwestern France city bubbles with lush images - locals deep in protracted discussions over the state of produce bursting with color, vendors comparing notes, and gnarled, nattily dressed French gentlemen carrying home stretched plastic bags filled with their weekly purchases. The scene resembles many of the visually compelling experiences unfolding for the sixteen participants of a five-day FirstLight photography workshop based in Auvillar, a hilltop village located between Toulouse and Bordeaux in this country's Midi-Pyrenees region.

Kate Mann, a forty-six-year-old medical writer from Maryland's eastern shore, is practicing her French with a produce vendor when she spies Andre Allibert, an area farmer whom she spent the previous afternoon photographing, setting up some tables just off the square.

"It's my farmer," she calls out over her shoulder as she walks briskly toward him. "Bonjour, Monsieur Allibert! Ça va ?"

The face of Allibert, who is unloading figs picked at his farm, La Sarcelle, the previous day, lights up as he literally squeals with delight.

"My American friend!" he calls out loudly, as they embrace. He then starts introducing her to everyone within earshot. Since I am accompanying Mann, I'm immediately accepted and enveloped in this little celebration. Allibert offers me a fig, which melts in my mouth.

It is a joyous, small moment, one of many that fills our challenging, and rewarding, week.

The Midi-Pyrenees, located just across the Spanish border, is the country's largest region, full of rolling hills, expansive farmlands, rocky gorges and snow-topped mountains, ancient towns and villages, castles and Romanesque churches. Gimont, an ancient bastide town that retains traces of its walls and fortifications (bastides were fortified settlements built in medieval Languedoc, Gascony and Aquitaine during the 13th and 14th centuries, typically constructed on hilltops and in a grid pattern for defensive reasons), hosts two weekly markets; one held on Thursdays, when all the usual array of fresh produce, simple fashions and crafts are on display, and its famous Sunday Foie Gras market, when avid fans of the goose liver delicacy queue outside the town awaiting their chance to buy what locals call the best Foie Gras in France.

Gimont is built on a long, narrow hill. Although little remains from its origins as a commune dating back to 1266, Gimont's terracotta-roofed, pastel-and-natural-stone-hued houses bask in the early morning light. I spend large chunks of my first three days here, as another workshop participant, sixty-one-year-old photographer Polly Crongeyer who has twenty years as a stockbroker under her belt, is also photographing the shop of Jean Daldosso, one of Europe's most respected organ makers and restorers. Daldosso and his eight craftsmen, whose average age is thirty-six, are currently repairing a monumental organ of Merklin-Schützte, which comes from the cathedral of Murcia, Spain.

The workers are inspecting, cleaning, and repairing the 19th-century organ's five thousand pipes, some of which are badly dented and worse from years of wear. They will dedicate three years restoring this one organ. We will spend parts of two days crawling around in the dust shooting Daldosso's employees, both days returning to home base, about an hour away past Chestnut trees and stone buildings, rolling hills dotted with apple orchards and armies of wearily slumping sunflowers ready for harvest, and clusters of forests, so that one of the instructors can edit and critique our day's photographic work.