Mauroux
In the summer of 2018 I spent a week in Mauroux in the South of France. I was in a transitional period, about to start a new job and trying to wrap my head around things that had happened in the period before. So in early June I packed my car and headed south. Mauroux is a small commune in the hills just south of the river Lot. It has beautiful meadows, forests, and wildlife. I was so glad to have my camera with me.
Freedom and privacy
The house I stayed at was an old farmhouse build on a hillside, with updated modern conveniences, a pool and a huge private terrain surrounding it. No one around far and wide, just trees, grass and the sun. The skies were magnificent during the night as well as during the day. The pool lay a bit higher up the hill than the house and gave a magnificent view of the valleys and hills beyond.
The dronefootage I shot of the house and the surroundings, I later used as visuals for a CausaliDox track inspired upon my time in Mauroux. It gives an impression of the vastness of the private domain and the sheer beauty of the place:
Timelapse
The clouds were so fascinating, the skies so huge, I had to do a timelapse. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the footage of the first timelapse I did, but I did shoot some film of the clouds travelling across the sky. Not a true timelapse but still pretty.
Nightphotography
Since there was so little light pollution, the skies at night were magnificent. The Milky Way was visible and I got an itch to experiment a bit with lights and long exposures. I love how of these turned out and I still have to laugh a bit at the memory of running around in the grass at night with my light, painting my photos!
Shooting from the pool
My favorite pastime while there was to float around in the pool looking out over the landscape and just let my mind wander. After a while though, I noticed how many insects accidentally found themselves in the pool with no hope of getting out. So I started an insect rescue service and tried to fish out as many insects as I could, putting them on dry land. Most of them sat there, still on the edge of the pool for a while, drying off in the sun, before continuing their journey. This gave me the idea to grab the camera and shoot them from inside the pool with a macro lens as they were recuperating. I also threw in a couple of cloudshots for good measure.
The San Francisco Incident
There was one Mauroux critter that went on to become a legend. After I rescued it, it hitched a ride on a plane to Hawaii, where it was subjected to radiation from a nuclear submarine and grew into an abominable sea spider. It learned to swim and one day it emerged from the ocean on the San Francisco shore. It was hungry and the city looked like a snack. Ok, not really.
I got bored one Saturday and spent an afternoon photoshopping the little spider into a picture of San Francisco while imagining the story above. It was fun, it was silly. It’s the last photo in the gallery below. = )
