Monthly:January 2012

Quote of the Week: Ernst Haas

“Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience. Take colour as a totality of relations within a frame…colour is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.” –Ernst Haas – Colour Photography Here’s a really interesting interview between Aidan Sullivan of Getty Images and Ernst Haas’s son, Alex Haas. Well worth a listen…

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Hong Kong Bound…

“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..”

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Pandas and Pollution

Last week saw a couple of interesting publications online that I wanted to share here. They are quite contrasting but are linked by their ties to environmental issues in China, which as readers of this blog will know, is a subject that I specialise in covering here in Asia. The first is from the Asia Society who did an interview with me about the current state of Giant Panda populations in the wild in China. I really like collaborating with the Asia Society as […]

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Quote of the Week: Michael Nichols

“If you say you really want my job, okay, here’s the deal. There are no more hobbies, no more fun. You can have fun doing the work, but you have to be completely obsessed with it. I think 99% of the people think that professional photography is travel and adventure, and they forget that photography is very, very hard work. You’re “on” all the time. When you go out the door to take pictures, nobody cares about any of the […]

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Happy New Year of the Dragon! 龙年快乐!

As fireworks begin to erupt around me here in Beijing, I just wanted to write a quick note to wish you all a fantastic year of the dragon! If you are lucky enough to be in an urban area in China this evening, you will be treated to a unique fireworks display like no other you will ever see. Here in Beijing, the sky erupts at midnight, exploding in a kaleidoscopic array of colours across the city welcoming the new […]

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Research Day

The Chinese New Year celebrations are upon us here in Beijing and it feels like the quiet before the storm today. I thought I’d take this opportunity to get in some research for some upcoming projects I have in mind for 2012. The new year, whether the western or Chinese, always feels like a good time to think about new story ideas and reflect on what’s happened the previous year. I’m currently planning new chapters for my work exploring environmental […]

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Behind the Smog That Ate Beijing

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 […]

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CCTV Building Shrouded in Pollution

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!

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China’s Fragile Forests – Interview for the Pulitzer Center

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 […]

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