Hong Kong residents and tourists walk past the famous Hong Kong skyline. 2008

This weekend I head south to the amazing city of Hong Kong! It’s my first serious travel of the year and I’m looking forward to getting away from the bitter cold of Beijing, for the warmer climes of the South China Sea.

I last went to Hong Kong in 2008 and was really blown away by the energy of the city and the mix of east and west. As a former British colony, it still has many British influences, which obviously make me feel at home being a Brit myself.

I shall be speaking at the University of Hong Kong during my time in the city, dropping in to give a presentation to some of the students there. I’ll also be shooting around the city, adding some images to the National Geographic Image Collection hopefully. So, I have a few days to wander around the city and try to capture that energy which captivated me last time. Will try to post updates during my week.

If you have visited Hong Kong before and have some reccomendations of places that MUST be photographed, please do let me know. Happy to hear suggestions!

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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For regular readers who have stopped by over the past few weeks, I must apologise for the lack of posts recently. The past couple of months were busier than I expected and blogging kept getting pushed back further and further down my list of things ‘to do’. Needless to say, I am back and will endeavor to post as regularly as possible in the new year. This is a new year’s resolution at the top of my list!

First up is an interview that I did for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting recently, talking about my project from last summer on ‘China’s Fragile Forests’, looking at the current threats to China’s Forests. I hope it gives you some insights into my project and how I approached it. Stay tuned for more updates on this project in the new year!

A young boy sporting a cowboy hat, looks out onto one of the many lakes that make up the Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve in northern Sichuan.

China’s Fragile Forests – Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting – Post 3

“Is it always like this?” I ask one of the park wardens, as I weave my way through the hundreds of tourists, all shuffling to get into the regimented lines funneling them into the park’s gates. “Well, this is peak season. There could be up to 10,000 people going into the park today,” he replies. This is the definition of mass tourism and it is taking place before me on a warm July morning in the mountains of northern Sichuan, at the gates of one of the country’s most famous tourist destinations, the Jiuzhaigou National Park.

Nestled high in the remote mountains of northern Sichuan, the Jiuzhaigou National Park is a spectacular area composed a series of valleys, containing a myriad of breathtaking turquoise lakes, rivers and waterfalls. They are surrounded by temperate broad-leaf forests that are home to the giant panda, red panda and golden monkey, among many other species. Its topography has been shaped over millennia by tectonic activity and glacial erosion which has created an entrancing visual setting.

It is this unique setting that has caused the rise in popularity of this park since the early 1990s, when it was awarded Unesco World Heritage status. Since then, visitor numbers have increased year by year. In 2007, it was estimated that 2.5 million people visited the Jiuzhaigou Park.

As tourists enter, they are bused between popular locations within the boundaries of the protected area. They regularly stop to jump off the buses, take pictures and then immediately return to their transportation to continue to the next spot. Their movements are tightly restricted to boardwalks which result in surprisingly little direct impact to the local ecosystems. The relatively small 720 sq. km. of valleys that make up the park, are arguably the best protected in the whole of China.

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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

Viewing the Terracotta Warriors

Last week, I had the opportunity for the first time to visit the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, in central China. I was excited to have this opportunity althougha little wary that I would be visiting a location that has been photographed from nearly every angle over the years, since their discovery in 1974. This is often the case when visiting popular sites and it is sometimes a real challenge to find something unique and different when you feel like you know a place well, even before you have visited.

As I wandered around the vast pits containing the warriors I, like everyone else, was stunned by the sight in front of me. The only problem was that there was quite a large distance between the visiting areas and the warriors themselves. This sense of wonderment in the visitors was therefore difficult to capture.

Upon further exploration of the site, I happened upon a room which containing a number of individual soldiers, encased in glass displays. This was the closest that visitors could get to a warrior. As a result, the hoardes of tourists squeezed around the case, all trying to get a good look.

My attention became focused on the visitors and I began to photograph them and their reactions to the warrior in front of them. It was their reactions which fascinated me the most and offered me the best opportunity at capturing the reaction of the people to seeing the warriors. I hope that the image above reflects (excuse the pun) their feelings and hints at the importance of this site to the Chinese people.

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 16-35mm f2.8 lens | ISO 1600 | f2.8 | 1/30th

Collecting Firewood in Inner Mongolia

This week, I returned again to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, whilst on assignment. I have been to this region a number of times over the past few years and really enjoy my time there. For those who don’t know, Inner Mongolia is one of China’s most northerly provinces, stretching across most of northern China. The landscape is dominated by grasslands however much of it is under serious threat from desertification.

In this photo, locals were collecting firewood, moving it from their truck to the side of the road. Deforestation is one of the main drivers are desertification in these regions. As trees are uprooted and roots removed, the soil loses its stability, drying quickly  as the desert moves in.

For those living in very rural areas, firewood is essential for their daily lives, however unregulated collecting can have disastrous consequences, especially when combined with other activities that fuel desertification. It is difficult though to implement a workable balance between local people’s needs and their impact on the environment.

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 16-35mm f2.8 lens | ISO 100 | f8 | 1/500th