Spotted this interesting little video on CNN that I thought readers here would be interested in, titled “What film photography still has to offer”.

I started out shooting film, although most of my practice now as a professional photographer has switched to digital. I miss it sometimes. I miss the feelings of anticipation you get before you get an exposed roll back from the lab. I miss using a loupe and lightbox and the feeling of discovering those one or two images on a roll that work and make it all worthwhile.

When I first started out trying to learn about photography, I decided to build my own darkroom. I searched for an enlarger in the local newspaper classifieds and set up all the equipment I needed, using books borrowed from the library as my guide. Over the following days, weeks and months I lost myself in the red-lit world of the darkroom and fell in love with photography. Now I shoot predominantly colour using digital but I think the best thing I ever did, to really understand the mechanics of photography, was when I built that darkroom. I can’t reccomend this highly enough to anyone starting out in photography.

I’ll finish this brief post with a quote from the above video which I think is also quite pertinent too for those aspiring photographers out there.

“One essential quality of photographers, is curiosity. If you’re not a curious person, you’re certainly not going to be a good photographer.” – Elliott Erwitt

New Archive - Click to Visit

I’m excited to announce here on my blog the launch of my new Archive, which will be home to many of my images, created over the past 5 years whilst working in China.

I hope that site can act as a resource for those looking for unique and illustrative imagery focusing on Asia, China and environmental issues.

All the images within the archive are thoroughly captioned and keyworded to assist you in locating exactly the images you need.

I will be constantly updating this archive in the coming months with new work and existing stories. Please take a moment to have a look around and recommend the archive to anyone whom you know who may be interested in imagery from Asia.

Happy browsing!

Giant Panda

A quick post for the weekend of one of my favourite images from the last week of shooting in Chengdu, Sichuan. As you can probably guess, this image is of a Giant Panda, taken at the Chengdu Panda Base in Sichuan Province. I was at the base this past week photographing the Pandas and interviewing scientists and staff as part of the next chapter in my ‘China’s Fragile Forests’ Series for the Pulitzer Center. The post will be coming soon, so please stay tuned. If you’ve missed my other posts and images from this new project, why not check them out over on the excellent Pulitzer site here.

Have a great weekend!

A woman holds tea leaves collected from a plantation nestled in the remote mountainous valleys of northern Sichuan. Tea plantations are some of the projects being targeted by the EU-China Biodiversity Programme to promote sustainable harvesting in the region.

Blog Post #2 for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting - China’s Fragile Forests

Haze enveloped the mountains as our car pushed further up the steep valleys into northern Sichuan. The green hills that fluttered past our window were a patchwork of forests, cleared areas and fields of maize. The road wound through the vertiginous ravines as we climbed steadily higher, pushing further towards the small town of Pingwu, nestled deep in the mountains.

I was travelling with a delegation from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the EU-China Biodiversity Program (ECBP) whose aim was to visit a number of sites in northern Sichuan where they have been sponsoring projects. The goals of these projects are to promote sustainable harvesting as an alternative to the exploitation and unsustainable collection of the forest’s resources that has been occurring in the region for many decades.

“China is one of the world’s 12 mega-biodiversity countries, but during the past decades we have had amazing economic development, so we are facing serious problems of biodiversity loss,” explained the UNDP’s Lu Chunming as our car snaked up a hillside to the first of our intended sites.

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The mountains of northern Sichuan Province, China.

This month is an exciting one as I begin my third Pulitzer Center-sponsored project on environmental issues in China titled, “China’s Fragile Forests“.

This new project is a follow-up to my 2009 project “China’s Growing Sands” and in 2010, “China’s Wetlands Crisis“.

I begin this month with the first installment from my travels throughout the south-west of China, the region hardest hit by deforestation in the late 20th Century and currently facing the most challenges as the Chinese people struggle to find a balance with their forest resources.

Please find below the first of my installments from the field. There are many more to come in the coming weeks. As ever, I look forward to your thoughts!

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Felled trees in northern Sichuan Province. 2011

Forest ecosystems throughout the world are key to the livelihoods of over 1.6 billion people. They cover 31 percent of the world’s land area, are home to over 300 million people, and contain 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity.

Thirty percent of forests worldwide also produce both wood and non-wood products that account for a trade of over $300 billion worldwide, per year. It is this trade that is threatening the planet’s remaining forests, as developing nations battle to find a sustainable relationship with their natural resources.

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Shooting video in the mountains of northern Sichuan. 2011

Are you on Tumblr? This is yet another popular blogging platform has emerged recently and proving to be very popular. I set-up an account last month and am now using it to for mobile uploads, posting images as I travel around China and the world working. I hope that this can help to give you a quick visual sense of what I am doing and provide you with another insight into my life as a professional photographer and videographer. This new platform will complement my text updates on Twitter and Facebook. All of course will all my viewable and accessible from this central hub on my blog. Look forward to seeing you on Tumblr!

Moonrise at 36,000 feet. Viewed from plane Enroute to Sichuan, China. 2011

Today, June 17th, marks the United Nations‘ World Day to Combat Desertification. As regular readers of this blog and followers of my work will know, a large portion of my work in recent years has been about the scourge of increasing desertification in China. Please take this opportunity today to spread links and talk about the issue of desertification, one of our world’s most pressing and under-reported environmental crises.

According to the United Nations:

“Desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) threaten human security by depriving people of the means to decent livelihoods. They undercut food production, access to water and the means to economic activity, and even destroy their homes. At worst, they lead to a breakdown in national and regional security as people are forced to leave their homes or to engage in low- or high-level intensity conflicts over increased or extended periods of resource scarcity.

Land degradation in the drylands, commonly known as desertification, begins with the clearing of vegetation, which means “forests are the first step towards healing the drylands and protecting them from desertification and drought,” as Mr Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification observes. Dry forests may become the single most important determinant of the future sustainability of the drylands as the impacts of climate change escalate. Yet, only 18% of the drylands is forested.

UN Drylands World Map - Desertification

The United Nations has designated 2011 as the International Year of Forests to stress the need for forests that serve people. Scientists and experts agree that this link is most evident and felt in the drylands where trees play multiple roles for the communities. They provide food and medicine for the people and their livestock. They are their places of worship and shelter and their decision-making centers. Trees mean life here and are not taken for granted by the close to 2 billion inhabitants that call drylands ‘home’.

In his call to the international community in February when unveiling the 2011 theme, Mr. Gnacadja stated, “If each of us makes the commitment and ensures that just one tree is planted in a degraded part of the drylands and that the tree survives through the year, we could have well over two billion trees in the drylands by the end of the year. That is a tree for every inhabitant. …let us go forth and forest the drylands to keep them working for present and future generations.”

A Tibetan woman in Xining. 2011 - (c) Sean Gallagher

This past week saw the first of our new Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau workshops. Leading this workshop with Tibetan Connections, I tried to introduce the students to this amazing part of China through photography. It was a great success and was a fascinating to see the students discover this region in their own different ways. To see images of the participants in action, please go here to the Facebook page for our workshops.

A pigeon in flight at a monastery in Repgong. 2011 (c) Sean Gallagher

In-between teaching, I had the opportunity to make some of my own images and use them as examples of what the students could achieve. By watching how I worked, I was hoping the students could replicate my methods in a way to improve their own photography.

Qinghai is a diverse and beautiful land. Sitting high on the Tibetan Plateau it is made up of mountain ranges and highland grasslands. The people of this region are predominantly Tibetan and as such have a unique and distinctive style and way of life. All of these facets we tried to capture during the course of our workshop.

A monk stands in a doorway in a monastery outside of Repgong. 2011 (c) Sean Gallagher

I want to say a big thanks to all our participants this week. For anyone interested in my workshops, we have another trip planned for October, this time to Xinjiang, also in the west of China. For more information about that tour, please go here to the Wild China website.

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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Canon T-shirt (black)

With summer almost upon us, I know many photographers are wondering what on earth their wardrobe contains that will ensure they stand out from the crowds of other photographers this season. Forget scarves. In case something goes wrong with your camera, why not have a t-shirt which doubles as a mini schematic of how your camera works?! The above t-shirt can be purchased in UniQlo in Beijing for the bargain price of 100rmb (US$15).

If schematics are not your thing, then you might want to head for the slightly more understated white t-shirt with simplified Canon EOS motif. Two, surely ‘must have’ items for this year’s summer wardrobe

Canon T-Shirt (white)