A view of air pollution over the CCTV building in Beijing, China. Wednesday January 18th 2012

I got a call on Wednesday from Foreign Policy magazine asking me to do a quick 1 day assignment. The brief? To travel around Beijing and capture the dense layer of smog that was sitting on top of the city. Beijingers and visitors will be all too familiar with this ‘fog’ which regularly descends upon the city. The story was published yesterday online and has become one of the most popular stories on the FP site (view here). I thought I would include here on the blog, a few shots that didn’t make the final cut and explain some of the challenges in photographing air pollution.

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Zhalong Wetlands - Heilongjiang - China

It has been a little while since my last update here on the blog, for which I apologise. It has been a very busy few weeks with lots of shoots and lots of travels. As a way to say thanks for your patience (if you have dropped in on here recently and found no updates!) is to offer you a sneak peak at some the images I took recently that will be making their way into a new multimedia piece that I am working on this week, as a coninuation of my work on China’s wetlands crisis.

Zhalong Wetlands - Heilongjiang - China

Last week I travelled to the province of Heilongjiang, which lies in the north-east of China. I travelled to this region as it was one of the last regions of the country that I had not had the opportunity to get to during my coverage of environmental issues in China over the past couple of years. This area is crucial to China as it is the ‘bread basket’ of the nation, producing vast amounts of food which are fuelling the people of China to make some of the amazing economic changes we have seen over the past few decades.

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Here is a teaser trailer for a corporate assignment that I was involved in last year. The project was for the company Bosch and the resulting body of work will be released this week. I just received a link to this trailer, so thought I would share it here.

I won’t reveal anything about the nature of the project, but it was quite unique and certainly an ambitious project. Please watch the video to see what I mean.

I’ll keep you posted, once I can reveal more….

Men standing on the side of a highway running through the North Korean countryside. 2009

“Starving North Korea Send out SOS for Food Aid” is one of the headlines that reads on the Daily Telegraph’s website this week. This week also marks the birthday of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il. I have chosen to mark this day with a video that was released a few months ago on the Telegraph website, secretly recorded by North Koreans dissidents, in attempt to show some of the frightening conditions in the country. It’s disturbing to watch.

As readers of this blog will know, I travelled to North Korea in the autumn of 2009 on assignment for the Globe & Mail. We had a very limited view of the real North Korea. Our 5-day trip was state-controlled and we were whisked across the country from one official tourist destination to the next. When our private mini-bus passed though rural areas, we were expressly told not to take any photos. I, of course, tried to get some. One of which is below. It’s only a fleeting glance, however.

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(Left) A CNN Newscast in a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea. (Right) An image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il as a child appears on a television in a hotel in Pyongyang.

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As anyone who has been watching the news in the past 24 hours will know, tensions on the Korean peninsula have been increasing very very quickly following the shelling of a small South Korean island, by the north Koreans yesterday. Tensions are nothing new, however after yesterday’s events it seems like attention is focused on the conflict more now than in many previous years.

(Left) A handgun from the Korean War in a museum on the South Korean side of the DMZ. (Right) A handgun is depicted during a dispaly at the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang, North Korea.

This seemed like a good time to release a short series that I have been playing with over the past few months, currently titled ‘Korean Reflections’. Readers of this blog and followers of my work will know that I have, relatively recently, had the chance to visit both North and South Korea. I travelled to North Korea in the autumn on 2009, as part of a 5-day undercover assignment for the Globe and Mail and this year I have visited South Korea three times, two times for corporate work and once for the Globe and Mail.

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Hu Jintao, President of the People's Republic of China

As many followers of my blog, Facebook and/or Twitter will know, I had a very unique assignment last week, photographing the British Prime Minister David Cameron on his recent visit to Beijing. It was one of the most interesting assignments I have ever had, mainly because of the access that I was able to get to the PM and the people that he was meeting thoughout his trip.

When I was approached to undertake this job, I assumed that that the PM would be meeting some high-ranking Chinese officials and I hoped that he would be meeting with those at the top. When I found out he would indeed be meeting the main leader in China, President Hu Jintao, my levels of anticipation were raised significantly.

Hu Jintao, is rarely seen outside of formal surroundings and images of him are much harder to come by. His security is tighter than for any other person in the country and he was recently voted by Forbes magazine as ‘the most powerful person in the world’, ahead of American President, Barack Obama. Whether you agree with that statement or not, the opportunity to photograph this man was one I did not want to pass up.

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BBC Viewfinder

Last week, I had an assignment from the British Embassy in Beijing to photograph the visit of British Prime Minister, David Cameron on his first visit as PM to China. This was a very exciting and interesting assignment and I plan to feature some of my behind-the-scenes photos here on my blog in the coming weeks.

Photographing someone like the PM is a very unique experience and I thought it would be interesting to share some of my experiences with you. Please stay tuned in the coming weeks and I look out for these special posts. In the meantime, scroll down to read my interview with BBC Photo Editor Phil Coomes on my experiences.

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“Earlier this week photographer Sean Gallagher spent two days in the company of the British Prime Minister David Cameron during his visit to China. Here Sean talks about the project.

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