I simply could not visit Normandy without seeing some of the history of D-Day invasion…consequently I dragged Mel around 3 such museums in two days! Very interesting and of course very sad…

I shot the above sunset image with Mel’s Canon 1100D, which is a nice portable little camera. However as Mel shoots JPEG files I did struggle with bringing up the sky, as there simply was not enough tonal range by comparison to if I had shot this in the RAW file format. In consequence, I can definitely see some posterisation and banding in the top right, however I can live with this for the web…

Inside the museum the next morning… Interesting to see the real ‘Rupert’ dummy dropped by the Allies to confuse the defenders next to the model made for the 1962 movie ‘The Longest Day’…

Approximately 6km from Arromanches lies the old German naval battery at Longues-Sur-Mer, situated between the Omaha and Gold landing beaches. The last of these formidable 152mm guns were captured by the 231st infantry brigade on 6th June 1944, the other 3 having been disabled by naval gunfire throughout the day.

After visiting Longues-Sur-Mer we headed onto Omaha beach, where we stopped at the Musee Memorial D’Omaha Beach.

The actual memorial on Omaha beach was commissioned in 2004 by the French government and is entitled ‘Les Braves’

As we wandered onto Omaha beach, a very sudden sea fog hauntingly materialised over the beach… Mel is generally reluctant to pose for me however I could not resist capturing her with this eerie fog swirling around us…