Wow. Thank you for taking that much time to look at them and all the commments and questions.
Many of the sites are instantly recognizable. Most actually were. I know we had a bit of trouble finding the spots where Frodo, Merry and Pippin hid from the urk-hai at the end of FOTR. But especially for a fan they're easy to place. Of course this was before ROTK came out so those sites were unknown/harder to place. I'm not sure it's one of the ones I posted or not but I took a picture of a cool rock at the Mordor/Emyn Muil site that turned out to be from ROTK. And while Pelannor was cool, I want to go back there now that I've seen ROTK so I know/can picture what happens.
Edoras was simply amazing. When Bernard Hill calls it the most uplifting place he's ever been to, well, you understand him when you are up there. As for elevation, it appears to be at 611m above sea level.
There were lots of lupines on the south island. Just tons of them alongside some roads. Really beautiful.
We did do a bunch of reenactments. Thankfully there were usually enough of us who were willing to take part (I personally had a lot of fun doing them). Those two guys (who are actually really good friends of mine now) swear they are never going to live down the humiliation of that particular one. he he.
Hobbiton-no, there is a lot of the set still there. Thankfully, since it's pretty darn cool! The set was all being taken away but then a flood happened and the land owners negotiated with New Line to keep the rest (around 17 I think) there. They are not allowed to repaint them or anything though which is interesting. It's the one location where you can still see the set. At all other places there was great care taken to remove all traces (they spent two or three days searching Pelannor for traces of stuff from the movie, for example).
I didn't use a digital camera. I used a Nikon SLR camera and when I had the film devleoped I had all the pictures put on CD. Thank you for the compliment though, I was very happy with how they turned out.
As for the stars, my favorite from the NZ trip was probably Elijah. I had a few minutes chat with him and he was wonderful and very friendly despite the fact he had to be very tired from the long plane ride. Although, John Noble holds a special spot for me since I have to love the fact that I'm sitting on his lap and where he has his hand. And he was flirting with me that night
Glad you liked the pictures! I actually have a picture of one of the spots used for Dunharrow that I saw on my trip over to NZ in September. I'll post that here when I get around to it. New Zealand really is Middle Earth, it's incredible.
