JAPAN. Himeji. Women dancing in yukata (summer kimono) at the Kawa Matsuri (River Festival). 2004.

Today marks the one year anniversary since the devastating Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11th, 2011.

I lived in Japan for one year between 2003-2004, so Japan and the Japanese people hold a special place with me. I watched with horror one year ago today as the disasters rocked a nation I had grown great fondness of.

Rather than re-post imagery of the events that day. I wanted to post a few positive images of Japan. Fond memories of a rich and inspiring culture.

My thoughts today are with Japan and the Japanese people, on what must be a very painful anniversary.

JAPAN. Himeji. A market stall selling masks of Anime characters. 2004

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Canon 7D - 16-35 L lens - ISO200 - f6.3 - 1/1250sec

I recently had the opportunity to meet and photograph one of China’s leading media women, Ms. Mei Yan of Viacom China. On assignment for the Brazilian magazine, Serafina, I met and photographed Mei Yan who runs MTV, amongst other media entities, at her office in central Beijing. I thought I would post a couple of the images from the afternoon here and give a small insight into the shoot.

The image above is the one that the magazine chose to run last weekend. You can see that this image was shot through a window, with Mei Yan standing on the inside while I stood outside. I was trying to get an interesting shot of her and I noticed that the harsh afternoon sunlight was creating some really interesting reflections. I asked Mei Yan to stand inside, making sure that the sunlight was hitting her face. I then proceeded to photograph her from the outside, making sure that I was getting her face against the black of the building. As the light was quite strong, I was under-exposing my a stop or two, to make sure her face wasn’t too overexposed.

Canon 7D - 16-35 L lens - ISO 200 - f9 - 1/160sec

The second shot was a little bit more straightforward however I again tried to use the harsh light and shadows to make the image a little more interesting. I under-exposed the image again to make the shadows very dark, almost black. As I was shooting, Mei Yan and I were talking and joking which meant I was able to get a very natural image of her smiling. I tried to balance to photo and make it a little bit more interesting by waiting for the cleaner to pass by on the left and place the plant on the opposite side. Altogether I was quite satisfied with this image and how we got a little bit of luck to make the portrait unique.

To learn more about Mei Yan, check out the article “A Censor’s Daughter Changes the System” on the Daily Best website.

I’ve decided to integrate my mobile uploads here on the blog, to centralize my updates and keep the blog updated more often.

The first of these was taken just 20mins ago in downtown Beijing. I’m on assignment today and as you can see, it’s another quite terrible day in the capital. Pictured is the iconic CCTV building, shrouded in haze. I’m trying not to breath too much while out shooting today!

John MacKinnon, of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, BEIJING, CHINA

John MacKinnon, of the EU-China Biodiversity Program, is one the world’s leading experts on biodiversity and the environment in China. He began his career in 1965 working with Jane Goodall in the famed study of the chimpanzees of Gombe. In 1968, he moved to Southeast Asia to study orangutans under the supervision of Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen.

MacKinnon first went to China in 1987 to work on the World Wildlife Fund’s Giant Panda project. He is an expert and author of 17 books on birds and mammals in China and has served for 14 years as co-chair for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. He was awarded the prestigious Order of Golden Ark, with highest rank of Commander by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for his lifetime services to conservation.

I caught up with him last month in the Beijing headquarters of the EU-China Biodiversity Program where we discussed some of the issues currently facing China’s wetlands.

This is an abridged version of the interview.

What are your thoughts with regard to biodiversity affected by wetland disappearance?

Probably of all ecosystems, wetlands are the most endangered because water is just used by people everywhere. So there is hardly a stream in China that doesn’t have somebody putting [something] into it or taking water out of it.

Everything is messed up with pollution–pipes taking off water for agriculture, for industry, for household use, building weirs across rivers to divert the water into little gullies. And then it gets bigger and bigger, up to these huge dams that the government has been putting in all over the place. China has thousands of these dams now which are having a profound impact on the water system. It means that fish and frogs can no longer move up and down river systems. Some are seasonal and need to go up into the head stream in the summer and lay eggs where the young can breed. And then in the winter these are frozen up, so they have to move down to the lower waters. Can’t do it anymore. So a lot of the species, a lot of the fish are endangered. Some are extinct.

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[vimeo width="570" height="320"]http://vimeo.com/15759317[/vimeo]

Regular visitors here may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a little while. Apologies for that. I have just returned from a 2-week trip to the US, taking part in speaking engagements at high schools and universities across the country. With the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, I’ve been speaking about environmental issues in China, trying to get students to connect to my stories and relate them to what issues are affecting their local communities.

As I zig-zagged across America, travelling mostly by plane, my mind started to wander onto the impact our air travel has on our planet. As a working photographer and videographer, my assignments normally require me to travel quickly from place to place, mostly by plane. My work focuses mainly on issues affecting the environment, so I try to live my life with those environmental issues in mind and the impact that I, as an individual, am having. Flying however is one the issues I most struggle with, made worse by the fact I find it a very enjoyable way to travel.

When you start to delve into the latest statistics about air travel and CO2 emissions, you quickly discover some frightening numbers. Some predictions point out that by 2025, airlines worldwide could be spewing out 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year, that’s half of the EU’s current total CO2 output. In 2009, total CO2 output from EU carriers did reportedly decline however it seems this only correlated with a decrease in the number of passengers flying. Some airlines do seem to be making active, positive steps towards change however, by testing biofuels. Airlines such as United Airlines for example, who flew the first flight by US commercial airline using natural gas synthetic jet fuel this year.

Sometimes though, you have to just sit back and just admire the marvel of flight. As I sat on my United Airlines flight from Washington DC to Beijing last week, my mind was wandering again on the above issues when I was distracted by what unfolded infront of me. Cruising half way between the US and China, we passed directly over the North Pole, just as dawn was breaking. It was one of the most spectacular and beautiful sunrises I have ever seen and I decided to try to record enough of it to show in a short video. It’s not everyday you see the sunrise over the North Pole. I hope you can enjoy reliving it with me, as I saw it.

[vimeo width="570" height="320"]http://vimeo.com/15090041[/vimeo]

I’m happy to announce that my new multimedia piece for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is now online. ‘The Chinese Alligator: Species on the Brink” is a look at the plight of China’s only crocodilian species and the effects of decades of wetlands reclamation on population numbers. By combining stills, video, interviews and time-lapse photography I hope this piece provides a visually interesting account of the current situation, as well as an informative one.

This is the first in a series of multimedia pieces that I will be producing for the Pulitzer Center over the coming weeks and months, so please do stay tuned for more.

The piece above is hosted on Vimeo where you can watch it in full HD at 1280×720. As it is HD, it may take a little time to load but I hope it’s worth the wait to get the best out of the video and stills. For all you techies out there, the whole piece was shot with a Canon 7D with 16-35mm F2.8 and 70-200 F4.0 lenses and audio was recorded on an M-Audio Microtrack II.

Once you start the piece, you will notice that there are interchanging Chinese and English subtitles. It has been one of my main aims to start reaching out to my Chinese audience more and I hope by producing these pieces in both languages that the message of the piece will reach more people. As Vimeo is blocked in China, I will be releasing this piece on Youku and Tudou soon. Please stay tuned for that.

If you have any thoughts or feelings about the piece, I am always happy to hear them!

A man walks through one of the drainage channels that make up the Dujiangyan Irrigation System.

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA

Water did not seem in short supply as I arrived in China’s southwest province of Sichuan. Rain was pounding on the windshield of my taxi and pools of water were starting to flow down the streets of the province’s capital, Chengdu. People scurried around the streets, desperate to get out of the storm that had quickly descended on the city.

This unsavory welcome was compounded by the delivery of  bad news from my assistant upon my arrival at my hotel. Our primary location for the week, the largest highland marsh and peat lands in Asia, Ruoer’gai in the north of Sichuan, had just been sealed off from the outside world. The heavy rains had caused  landslides which had wiped out all roads leading to the 3500 meter plateau which it sat upon. These marshes comprise half a million hectares and have been dubbed the ‘kidneys’ of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Made up of 90 percent water, they act like a sponge sequestering carbon and providing a home for a vast range of highland species. A vital ecosystem and source of water, they are the origin of the Yellow River, one of China’s mightiest waterways.

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A teenager with his yak on the shores of Qinghai Lake. 2010

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, QINGHAI PROVINCE, CHINA

Tenzin’s green eyes bored into me as I looked at his sunburnt face. “Qinghai Lake is a very holy place for us. We regard it as the ‘soul’ of Qinghai.”

He was sitting by the side of a road running parallel to the lake shore. The sound of cars rushing past filled the air as Tenzin’s kneepads, torn and grazed, fluttered in the wind generated just a meter or two away. Tenzin was taking a momentary break from prostrating his way around the 360km circumference of the lake, in a stark and vivid act demonstrating the importance of this lake to Tibetans, who make up 80 percent of people in the region.

Located at 3200 meters above sea-level on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau in the northwest of China, Qinghai Lake is the country’s largest inland body of saltwater at 4318 square kilometers in area. Over the past century, however, the lake has found itself in a worrying downward trend as 700 square kilometers of its area have been lost and its surface level has dropped by 13 meters.

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Join the hoards at Badaling during 'Golden Week' Holidays. 2006

<<Return to the Learning Zone In the second of my series of “Where is the best place to photograph…” (view the first one can be found here), I want to tackle possibly THE most famous landmark in the whole of the country: The Great Wall of China.

This iconic landmark is photographed like no-other and has fascinated photographers, all looking for the best vantage point in order to capture this amazing structure. But the question is; Where is the best place to photograph the Great Wall of China?

In this post, I shall offer up 4 suggestions. These are not the only locations of course. I have not visited every part and these are just my choices. If you know of, or want to recommend interesting/photogenic parts you have been to, please feel free to let us know in the comments section below and vote in the survey.  So, let’s begin….

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TEDx Canton

Next week sees the arrival of TEDx on the Guangzhou Science Center, in southern China. I feel very flattered and honoured to have been invited to be one of the speakers at the event, talking about my recent work over the past couple of years for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. For those of you who are free on Saturday 4th September, click the picture above to get info about how you can get hold of some of the last remaining tickets that are available. I am sure that it is going to be an amazing day, with great talks and attended by a lot of very interesting people.

If you see me there, please come and say hi!