Happy Xmas and New Year!

Wishing all readers a happy Christmas and New Year!!!

Weekend Workshops

I am delighted to announce two new workshops in January, to welcome in the New Year.

The first, is the next in line of our increasingly popular “Hutong Photography Workshops” which will be held on Sunday 17th January at the Far East Youth Hostel in Beijing. As ever, this will be a great opportunity to explore the maze-like hutongs in central Beijing.

The second workshop, will be in Harbin and will coincide with the famous Ice Festival. Our workshop will run all day on both Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January. Sign up for either one or two days (get a discount for two days) and come and explore this amazing winter wonderland with us and your camera.

Also, as it is the New Year, we would like to extend a *Happy New Year Special Offer* to all former students, giving a 10% discount  on any workshops (both group and one-on-one) taken in January.

For details on all of the above workshops, please go HERE to our workshop page.

We look forward to seeing you on one of our workshops soon!

It’s a small milestone for the Sean Gallagher Photography Blog today (well, yesterday, technically)…we’ve hit 6 months blogging! I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to everyone who has stopped by, read what I’ve had to say and commented on some of the pictures, videos and articles that I’ve posted.

The most popular post over the past 6 weeks has been the video that I shot and produced in North Korea, here. It’s been popular on my YouTube channel too, getting nearly 1000 views, as of today.

The most popular page on the blog has been the WEEKEND WORKSHOPS page, which is getting a lot of interest. We are just about to announce our workshops for January, so please stay tuned, they will be posted any day now!

Thanks again for stopping by. As you know, we’re on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so stop by and see us there as well. Here’s to the next 6 months…at least!!!

International Migrants Day

“The UN proclamation of the annual International Migrants Day offers a rallying point for everyone across the world who is concerned with migrants. It is an opportunity to recognise the contributions made by millions of migrants to the well-being and economies of their countries.” – Compassion for Migrant Children

This Friday, 18th Dec, will see the China-based NGO Compassion for Migrant Children (CMC) host a fund-raiser in conjunction with International Migrants day. The event will be held at the New Cultural Art Center at the 798 Art District in Beijing from 7pm until late and will involve a Chuan’r bar, live music and a silent auction of photographs donated by local photographers.

I am happy to say that a few prints of mine will be available in the silent auction. So, if you are in the area on Friday night, please come down, pay 50rmb, enjoy the festivites and maybe even go home with a print. If you can find me at the event, I’ll happily sign it for you!

To get more info, visit the event website here. Hope to see you there.

New York Times' Lens Blog

A couple of online publications this week that I’d like to share with you this week.

NYT

The first one was on the New York Times’ Lens Blog which appeared on their site on Tuesday. James Estrin of the NYT wrote a very nice piece on me and my work on ‘China’s Growing Sands for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ran a gallery of 18 images to go with it. I’m really happy that the work has found this online platform and will reach out to so many people. Click on the image above to take you to the article.

bit.yl

It’s hard to know how much ‘reach’ work gets when it is published online. Of course I use things such as Google Analytics to track hits to my website and blog, but how do you track social networks passing on links about your work? Well, one of the tools I use is this website bit.yl This site allows you to shorten your links into handier bite-size lengths, then track them, in terms of numbers of clicks. Using this, I know that just through Twitter the link was viewed over 300 times. A modest amount, but that is another 300 people viewing the work, on top of those through Pulitzer, my blog, you tube etc. etc. over the past few months.

Socialdocumentary.net

Also this week, the website Socialdocumentray.net published a series of my pictures on the story of homeless communties in Mongolia. This body of work is in the pool of entries for the “Crisis and Opportunity: Documenting the Global Recession’ Competition. If you like the story, please help spread the word and awareness of this issue.

A sandstorm in China's central Ningxia Province. 2009

As many followers of my work and my blog will know, much of my work falls within the category of environmental photography. As talks begin in Copenhagen today, on the immediate future plans of our governments to tackling climate change, it seemed appropriate to write a special blog post on photographing climate issues in China. In between the text are some of my favourite images from my work on climate change here in China.

A lone chimney stack on the outskirts of Baoding, China's first carbon-positive city. 2009

It seems that photographing climate issues have become quite a trendy topic recently. Magnum photographer Martin Parr recently described it as “as hip as it gets” in a recent blog post (via/ the excellent Duckrabbit, who do sterling work on Climate issues in Bangladesh, by the way). This is all unsurprising really. Climate change is the story of our generation and it’s a bandwagon that everyone should be jumping on. Our responsibility as photographers comes with truly understanding the issues we are photographing and being clear in the message that we are trying to convey with our pictures.

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YouTube

I haven’t announced this officially but I now have a YouTube channel! As I have started to produce more video work and multimedia over the past few months, I obviously want to get this work out to as many people as possible and YouTube seems to be the perfect venue as it is possible to upload multimedia content, even without video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN4gKiD9JyY[/youtube]

I currently have 5 entries on the channel; ‘Inside North Korea Parts 1, 2 and 3′, ‘China’s Growing Sands’ for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ‘China’s 60th Anniversary Preparation in Hangzhou’, for the Globe and Mail. By far the most popular video so far has been Part 1 of Inside North Korea which has nearly 1,000 views. A modest amount.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BHVnG3m7BU[/youtube]

I have embedded a couple of the videos here on this blog entry but please go to the channel here to subscribe and have a look at some of the videos and spread the word to others who you feel may be interested in the work I am doing.

BritCham

I have been invited to speak at the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, on January 14th 2010, speaking about my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on ‘China’s Growing Sands’. If you are in town on the date, please come along! This is a rescheduled event from last year, so hopefully this will give more people a chance to come along and see images from my work covering desertification. All the details of the event can be found below. Hope to see you there!

Event Name – Speakers’ Corner: China’s Growing Sands

Speaker(s) – Sean Gallagher, Photographer

Date and Time – Thursday 14th January 2010, 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Venue – Mesa & Manifesto, 748 Julu Lu, near Fu Min Lu,T: 6289 9108

Cost – Member: RMB 120, Non-member: RMB 150

Payment Method – Pay at the event

Contact Details – events@sha.britcham.org / +86 (21) 6218 5022

BritCham Shanghai

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