Last Refuge: Film, Images, Aerials and Publishing

Films, images and articles of wildlife, nature, landscapes, aerials, peoples, environments, medical, science & adventure.

Last Refuge Ltd. is a small Company dedicated to the support of endangered environments and species in our changing world, through films, images and research. We are also involved in aerial filming and photography. Over the past eight years, we have built a large archive of aerial photographs of Britain, and with our wing mount for Cessna aircraft, we facilitate remote sensing, infrared and mapping surveys internationally.

Last Refuge was established in 1992, while studying the plight of surviving wild Giant Pandas in the Qinling Mountains of Central China. Since that time, we have worked on projects in Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Madagascar, Namibia, Tanzania, Mali, Morocco, Rwanda, Congo, Malaysia, Thailand, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom.

2009 began with filming Dr George Schaller and mountain gorillas in Rwanda for National Geographic. Our new book ‘The Living Coast’, an aerial journey around Britain’s coastline, had been published just before Christmas. It was our fourteenth aerial book since 2002. At home, work continued on building wing mounts for clients in Germany and Holland one to carry the Red One camera and the other a FLIR package for an energy conservation project. We carried out flight tests with a mount installed on a Cessna 208B Caravan and worked with EASA and FAA in order to expand our list of aircraft on our STC clearance. We are also working on new designs with varying degrees of stabilization, and with camera housings, for use in movie, stills and other aerial sensing applications. In May, we attended the wrap party and premiere of Pixar Animation Studios production ‘UP’ which we had been consulting on since 2006. For still photography, we finally took the plunge to digital, after using Hasselblad medium format film for 30 years, with a Hasselblad H3DII 50 megapixel system. We immediately used this on a trip to Venezuela, partly research, partly a recce for a new film project, together with a shoot for a travel company. Our stills archive continues to expand and our Imacon scanner has been working full time.