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.

Chan Koonchung - The Globe & Mail

Last week I had the opportunity to photograph the Hong Kong author, Chan Koonchung, who has recently sprung to the attention of the international community as a result of the publication of his book, The Fat Years. The Fat Years paints a dystopian picture of China, dissecting the political workings of the country and its implications on the pysche of modern Chinese.

I’ve included  a couple of images from the shoot, one of which was used online to accompany the article written by the Globe & Mail’s East Asia correspodent, Mark Mackinon. Read his article “Chinese must not forget the past, warns author of the Fat Years“.

Chan Koonchung in a Starbucks in Beijing. 2012

Chan Koonchung in the Sanlitun district of Beijing. 2012

Shi Kang - Wall Street Journal

If you happen to look at the Wall Street Journal today, keep an eye out for a few images of mine that are online and in print. I recently had the opportunity to spend the day with Chinese author, Shi Kang, on a shoot for the Wall Street Journal. The story has been published today. Read it here.

Shi Kang is a fascinating character. He writes mostly about the disillusioned lives of young Chinese and is now a household name, due to the success of his novels. I spent the day with him photographing his daily life and chatted with him a lot about his writings and his thoughts about modern China. Watch the video below, by Angela Yeoh, to get a further glimpse into Shi Kang’s life…

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.

Tourists on Coal Hill in central Beijing. Wednesday January 18th 2012

The first challenge was making sure that I was able to get a representative picture of Beijing in the space of around 6 hours. This was an unplanned assignment, as FP editors had been closely watching the BeijingAir feed on Twitter, waiting for it to hit “hazardous” levels. This meant that logistically, I had to plan the day in the space of a few minutes before grabbing my cameras and heading out the door. Making sure that I was able to get to as many of Beijing’s distinctive landmarks as possible, I decided that given the time that I had I would aim for Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the CBD area of Guomao and the Olympic stadium.

The sun burns though the smog in central Beijing. Wednesday January 18th 2012

The next challenge comes from actually getting images that convey the sense of pollution and haze. If you are shooting with a wide-angle lens at ground level, it’s actually difficult to effectively show the effect of the haze. I quickly decided that to get shots with some impact, I would have to find some way to change this. I decided I needed some elevation.

The CBD area of Beijing is similar to most other business districts, lots of hi rise office buildings. I knew that if I wanted to get a sense of being in the smog, I needed to get up into these office buildings to shoot. I was a little hesitant at first, as I expected any request I made to photograph from the buildings to be denied. Surprisingly though, the couple of offices that I tried happily let me in to shoot for a couple of minutes.

A view of air pollution over the Guomao (CBD) area in Beijing, China. Wednesday January 18th 2012

From the CBD, I headed to ‘Coal Hill’ which is located north of the Forbidden City. It’s arguably the best place in Beijing to get a view of the Forbidden City and on a good day, you can see half way across the city. I knew that I wanted to try and capture some of old Beijing, to contrast my shots from the CBD and Bird’s Nest. Getting the elevation from being on top of the hill was again, key to getting the shots.

Air pollution obscures the view of the Olympic stadium, the 'Bird's Nest', central Beijing, China. Wednesday January 18th 2012

All in all, I was pleased with the results from this shoot, considering the time restrictions and number of locations. I hope these images help convey the severity of air pollution in Beijing. It’s a very serious issue and one which affecting the health of every person in Beijing and in many other cities throughout China.

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.

The challenges lie in the immediate vicinity to the park which accommodates the thousands of tourists who descend each day. The majority reside in hotels that line the streets of the small village of Pengfeng, just outside the park. At times, this small village seems to be at bursting point as noisy buses hurtle constantly along the narrow mountain roads and the throngs of tourists shuttle between their hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and ultimately the park entrance.

This is a small part of China’s “Western Development Strategy” which was introduced in 1999 and formally started in 2000 by the country’s State Council. The aim of the strategy is to help the underdeveloped western provinces of the country catch up with the more prosperous ones in the East. This race to catch up has caused concerns among the environmental community as rushed developments compromise local ecosystems, especially the remaining forested regions of the southwest of China.

“At stake are some of the most valuable scenic sites and endemic flora and fauna in China together with critical hydrological services affecting the supplies of the Yangtze River, flood and erosion control and prevention of landslides,” according to a study by the EU-China Biodiversity Program.

Up until 1998, when China’s nationwide logging restrictions came into effect, many of the region’s forests were still being severely depleted. “In 1997, I travelled to Jiuzhaigou,” said Lu Chunming of the United Nations Development Program. “At that time you could see many farmers cutting trees. They floated them down the river. There were so many that the river was full. When I asked why they were doing this, the farmers said because the ban was coming, they were cutting down as many trees as possible.” Attitudes towards the environment, especially towards the region’s forests, have been hard to change in the minds of those who see them as more of a resource than an area to protect.

The relationship between the people of the region and the forests continues to be a fragile one, as the west of China continues rapid developments trying to catch up with the progress of the east of the country.

Small inroads are being made, led by a new eco-tourism program that is in its early stages of development at Jiuzhaigou. Small groups of tourists are taken into one of Jiuzhaigou’s off-limit valleys to experience the area in its natural form. This one valley alone contains 40 percent of China’s total plant species, reenforcing the fact that this region is one of the country’s and world’s biodiversity hotspots.

“I believe we are responsible for educating the people that come here. It is a challenge because the level of awareness of a lot of these people is quite low. They don’t fully understand the importance of the ecosystem,” said Kieran Fitzgerald, referring to the “mass” tourists. Fitzgerald is an advisor who works for the park, helping to promote the fledgling eco-tours. “I think it’s one of the responsibilities of a national park to educate visitors on the environment, the importance of the environment and just to give them a sense of appreciation.”

With up to 10,000 visitors each day, it’s a huge challenge for the park, especially as the vast majority of visitors seem to opt for the mass tourism experience rather than the eco-tours. However, if only a small percentage of the “mass” visitors can be reached, perhaps over time, attitudes can be changed. “My main hope is that we can continue to develop tourism here sustainably. Sustainability is the only option and sustainable development is the only option. That’s why eco-tourism is so important,” said Fitzgerald.

The worry is that environmental education might not be the priority at Jiuzhaigou. With each visitor paying approximately 300 RMB ($46) per ticket, annual revenues from ticket sales alone are about $90 million. This is a well-oiled revenue generating machine and is obviously a key part of the Western Development Strategy and Sichuan Province’s continued economic development.

For the sake of the region’s ecosystems, it can only be hoped that environmental awareness, education and protection can become equal priorities in the area’s future development. If not, then a huge opportunity will have been missed to inform and educate the public about protecting these vital and precious ecosystems in the southwest of the country.

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.

“Although before we did much work on biodiversity conservation, we still have many problems. The most important one is that since the ECBP biodiversity conservation projects are still not mainstream thinking of government and also of local communities, this has caused a serious problem for sustainability. This means the project comes and they do their work and when the project ends, everything goes back to before. So one of the major targets of the ECBP projects is to mainstream biodiversity in China from central government to a local community level,” he said.

On the fringes of the Xuebaoding Nature Reserve in Pingwu County, we trek into the mountains to visit a small community that is being sponsored by ECBP. “The village traditionally collects traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), but resources are damaged because of over-harvesting,” said Lu. “In 2008 they produced 500 kg of TCM for sale. In 2010, that had gone up to 10 tons.”

Traditional Chinese medicine is collected from the forests by locals, often unregulated and unchecked. Unsustainable harvesting is still a problem throughout Sichuan as demand for the medicine increases each year across the country.

Approximately 75 percent of commercially harvested traditional Chinese medicine comes from the mountainous forests of the upper Yangtze region. It’s a vast harvest that generates over $10 billion in revenue each year and accounts for nearly 25 percent of China’s medical industry. As a result, over-harvesting to meet China rising demand for TCM, has damaged forest ecosystems in Sichuan.

This industry, however, plays a significant role in local people’s incomes, presenting the challenge of protecting forest ecosystems, promoting sustainable management and conservation of medicinal plants, while at the same time helping local people secure their livelihoods.

Encouraged by ECBP, the farmers in this small community in Pingwu County have now set up a local cooperative which enables them to communicate better with each other and track the harvests from the local forests through a centralized management center, allowing them to regulate amounts harvested.

Later in the week, we push further into the mountains, this time to visit projects promoting beekeeping and tea plantations. Both have the same aims as the TCM project–to promote the sustainable management of the local ecosystems–and are proving to be good examples of how locals in Sichuan can work with environmental NGO’s and local government to better protect the forest’s resources.

Challenges still remain as lucrative industries such as TCM and tea harvesting tempt over-exploitation, and old ways of thinking die hard. These are also just a few small projects in a vast province containing over 20 million people. The hope is that ECBP’s influence in central government filters down to the local level and is widely implemented across the region.

“It seems the local farmers place more emphasis on their livelihood improvement but they still have poor knowledge on biodiversity,” said Lu as he concluded his review of the project. “However, the community leaders and cooperative managers, they have good knowledge. So we hope that in the future, in some years, the idea of biodiversity can be more accepted and understood by the normal farmers.”

For the time being, these small pockets of communities remain in the minority, as over-harvesting of the forest’s resources in Sichuan continues to severely threaten these fragile ecosystems.

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.

2011 marks the UN’s official “Year of the Forest”—aimed “to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests.”

As the UN marked this year and its significance to forests, Conservation International, an NGO, produced a new list highlighting the world’s most threatened forest regions. “These forests have lost 90 percent or more of their original habitat and each harbor at least 1,500 endemic plant species,” the group said.

Having covered environmental issues in China for over four years, my focus has been on the challenges facing the country’s wetlands and also the threat from increasing desertification. I was surprised to learn earlier this year that the forests of southwest China were included on Conservation International’s new list and were under such threat—ranking alongside Madagascar, Indo-Burma, the Philippines, the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, and other regions.

Currently only 8 percent of the temperate coniferous forests of the mountains of southwest China remain. Much of this loss has occurred since the late 1950s as China’s early modern development gained momentum and stripped many of the mountains of its timber and resources.

In 1998, China introduced a widespread logging ban after devastating floods, which took the lives of over 4,000 people, forced more than 18 million from their homes and caused billions of dollars worth of damage. These floods were blamed on soil erosion caused by deforestation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze and brought this issue to the forefront of political and social attention.

New challenges have surfaced, however, since the ban, as clandestine logging still takes place. Pristine forest ecosystems, now home to endangered species, remain fragmented, and locals in poorer rural regions search for new ways to sustainably use the forests’ resources.

The most threatened forests lie in the mountainous provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan and historically have suffered the most from deforestation and habitat fragmentation. It is here that I begin my travels this week for the Pulitzer Center. I will spend the next month traveling within this region, visiting numerous sites associated with the key issues surrounding forest loss and conservation, investigating the fragile relationship that China still has with its forests.