I love shooting sessions in my backyard, so, so much. Taylor was a senior of mine a few years ago and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to shoot with her again. She is made of pure fairy tales :)
After our time in the cities, we headed to the Annapurnas to start filming for Epic Rides Nepal. These mountains were unlike anything I had seen - they made the Rocky Mountains look small and quaint :) We flew on a tiny propeller plane from Pokhara into Jomsom, took a long, bumpy ride to Muktinath, and started filming there. From Muktinath, we trekked from town to town, filming and shooting along the way. I even got to film partly from horseback! It was absolutely breathtaking - and exhausting. We found ourselves falling asleep in our dinner by 7 or 8 pm :)
Check out some of the footage we filmed here:
[vimeo 99539009 w=1280 h=720]
[vimeo 99482976 w=1280 h=720]
In May, we spent about a month in Nepal, where I shot + filmed for some awesome organizations, including my good friends at Portal Bikes and Epic Rides Nepal. What an amazing trip! Nepal blew me away. I especially fell in love with the vast, rich history that you can feel in every alley and street in the Kathmandu. We were welcomed by kind and thoughtful people and ate the most amazing food. The trip was absolutely amazing, but the timing of it was a bit crazy: we had been living on the road January - beginning of April. When we got back, we went under contract to buy our first house. Then, our dog had surgery to remover cancer in her leg, which required daily vet visits for weeks. We left for a month in Nepal in early May, and we closed on our house three days after we got back, packed everything up, and then moved house the next week. It was a complete whirlwind of good things :)
We had so many adventures in Kathmandu - when we arrived at the airport, there were three large pallets filled with crates of baby chicks, but not the mountain bike we had checked as baggage (don't worry, it came a few days later); we wrapped our bikes in glowing EL wire and zoomed through the alleyways at night; we gave a taxi driver wrong directions and ended up wandering around a spice market halfway across the city; we successfully got a welder and three trunks full of tools through customs; when we got attacked by monkeys at Pashupati Temple, I physically fought them off using my 70-200 2.8 lens as a bat; we drank delicious coffees on rooftops surrounded by fluttering prayer flags; I was surrounded by a group of young monks in training who watched over my shoulder as we filmed bike footage in the dense forests on the outskirts of town.
From my journal: Kathmandu feels OLD, and at the same time, oddly familiar: narrow alleys, low doorframes, lots of dark, rich wood, oxen on the sidewalk downtown lazily munching on corncobs from someone's hand. A thousand bicycles weave in and out of traffic. Our guesthouse is lovely - rattan woven floor mats, dark carved wooden beams, mosquito netting, just steps away from Patan Square where the butter lamps shimmer at night under a hazy full moon. Everyone is kind, and the streets are elegant and charming and mazelike, with tiny birds chirping, and the scents of coconut rice, spices, diesel, incense, curries.
Check out the video I shot for Portal Bikes!
[vimeo 100753829 w=1280 h=720]
