I promise I’ll have a real post up for you all soon, but until then here are my latest musing on film making. It might not be my usual “Out of the Way Place” post, but the film and photos are still very close to me.

La Vie Nous Appartient

From majestic cliffs to serene lakes, “La Vie Nous Appartient” is a cinematographer’s dream. Even so the beautiful settings present their own series of obstacles that make shooting this film a particular challenge. The most obvious difficulty is that the whole film is shot outdoors.  That means being at the mercy of the weather, an element beyond our control, and coping with noisy planes overhead (director Alex Lee’s least favorite set intruder).

Today we had a new challenge, which was to film in the extremely low light of a cave.  A major obstacle to photography

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After a three year break from working, the 12 hour days of a movie set are making keeping up with posts a challenge. Even so I had the pleasure of doing a write up on friend and director Alex Lee for the film I’m working on. Enjoy!

La Vie Nous Appartient

As both director and screenwriter for La Vie Nous Appartient, Alex K. Lee is the driving force behind the creation of La Vie Nous Appartient.  He wrote the screenplay in a burst of creative activity, finishing the first draft in a matter of weeks, and less than a year later here we are on set with filming underway.  Yet despite this involvement or even intimacy with the project, Alex is reluctant to discuss too many details regarding the film. The ideas, the symbolism, the significance, these are things Alex prefers to let speak for themselves.  After all, “if the meaning could be expressed in a few simple sentences why make the film in the first place?”

This reluctance to explain himself applies not only to

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Inverness Castle

A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of all the amazing beauty I’d seen when traveling through Scotland last year.  One of the many places I visited which was never featured on An Out of the Way Place was Inverness, the Florence of Scotland.  Located on the southern tip of the famous Lock Ness, the city is built along the River Ness and overlooked by the picturesque Inverness Castle.  I captured this photo late one night when the moon briefly appeared between the seemingly ever-present Scottish rain clouds.

Although a castle has loomed on the hill since the time of MacBeth, the current structure is a “recent” 1836 reconstruction.

And He’s Back!

No I didn’t fall off a mountain, get buried by a landslide or die in a plane crash.  Actually the most commonly guessed explanation for my absence was that I was arrested and locked up in a Nepalese prison, alas even that didn’t happen.  Instead I was suffering from the rather mundane problem of a malfunctioning computer combined with a relatively high level of isolation as I returned to the Himalayas for another dose of intense trekking.

Isolation isn’t always a bad thing.

That’s all in the past now and you can expect

Everest Base Camp Trek – Days 2 & 3

Day 2 – Monju to Namche Bazaar

I woke up feeling something less than refreshed, but certainly enthusiastic for the day to come.  I still had a bit of lingering jet lag, aggravated perhaps by the difficulty of sleeping at high elevation, and this resulted in several hours of restless thoughts in the night.  On the other hand my new companions looked like they would make for good company. They were all independent travelers carrying their own packs and I hoped they would keep a slightly less grueling pace than my friends from the day before.

The use of metal makes them one step removed from the bridges in Indiana Jones, but looking down is still an intense experience.

The new group – six people including me – consisted of: a young German engineer with a love of photography, a middle-aged Englishman that loved adventure, a Phillippina doctor about my age traveling for the first time and a young Canadian couple that had been teaching English in Thailand.  This group, which in some variation would make my travel companions for the trip