less than 1 week to go

During the summer solstice of 2006, good friend and collaborator Craig MacDonald and I travelled to Scotland for geneological reasons. He wanted to find information about family who had emegrated from the island of South Uist to the New World in the 19th century. Along the way we sampled the cuisine - if you consider haggis and neeps & tatties as such - the landscapes (seen here and here), and the inhabitants - many of whom seemed to be transplanted Brits. On the beach in Skye one morning, the midgies sampled us. At times I felt like the expedition photographer, occasionally straining for something other than a tag along role.

Upon returning to our respective homes, Mr. MacDonald graciously offered to permit me to generate the itinerary for the next trip we would take together. Becoming something of a homebody who has an increasingly difficult time justifying using aircraft to jet from location to location for the sole purposes of vacationing, I briefly toyed with and proposed a trip starting in Trieste and heading north through Eastern Europe, maybe encountering Zizek somewhere along the way. That trip didn't happen.

In its stead, I proposed that we take the funding required to travel to some indeterminate point on the globe and apply that to the production of a fictional movie to be shot at home in Central Virginia. A script is in hand, and it seems as if the majority of the pieces have come together. Which leaves me with the primary question: can two men who have never met convince us that they are longtime friends? At the moment, not my department. And in fact not necessarily pertinent to the enterprise. The endeavor is a trip through our artistic sensibilities, and an anthem to the glory of process. It's the journey, not the destination, despite the overwhelming evidence that no one out there cares about the difficulty of the process. They only care about what they can see in front of their faces, which is the end result.

Every day is a new roller coaster ride. Such is the life of a "no budget", no name, movie producer/writer/assitant director/production manager/cinematographer/Steadicam operator. I'm calling this venture - while it's working title is "Walking With Roscoe" - our 2011 trip to find the lost dream. Every day I veer from terror about what I've gotten myself into, to contentment that whatever we capture will have to be good enough. It's now down to less than a week before we begin working with cameras, lights, and actors. People seem to like the script, so at least the worry about the value of the material is being held at bay for now. No doubt I could still extricate myself, but by now it's pretty much got me in its grip and the production is headed forward without too much input from me. There are still many details to define, but the beast is nearly breathing on its own.

time to move on?

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After five attempts to compose something from this landscape during the full moon rise (minus one night for this particular exposure), it's getting to be similar enough that I need to search for something different. On the other hand, now that the weather has turned warm again, it's incredibly pleasant being out in a nearby location at the intersection of moonrise and sunset, whether one or the other is obscured by clouds or not.

The bugs make their presence well known at that time of day, particularly in tall grass. But it's nothing to compare with the midges of Scotland that we encountered almost exactly four years ago, or the black flies last summer when we were in Grand Isle, MI. Photographers' preferred times of dawn and dusk also happen to be when midges and black flies swarm the most. Travelers to the beauties of the Highlands need to know about this nasty fact of Scottish life. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula the black flies swarmed badly enough to make large format photography (aka slow photography) exceedingly unpleasant along the shore of Lake Superior. In both locations, keep moving and the swarms are not usually unbearable. Set up a camera on a tripod for several minutes, and the hoards descend, bringing temporary insanity. Fortunately here in Central Virginia, the instances are far smaller, hardly approaching swarm status. But without some protection one is bound to return with mosquito bites.

Despite the blood sucking element to the environment, I'm likely to return repeatedly to this location.