China AGAIN!

Yes, as some of you know, I was asked to go back and speak to the photographers in China again!  My last visit a month or so ago was for speaking at an international convention, but this time it was a multi-city road show.  Me and Louis Tonsmeire, Jr (next years PPA President) would speak to a group of photographers for an entire day, then we’d take a taxi to the airport, fly to the next city and arrive at out hotel around midnight, get up and speak all day to a new group of photographers, take a taxi to the airport, and so on from city to city.

It was a very rigorous but exciting schedule.  One of my favorite photo shoots came in Beijing, where I had an absolutely stunning model named Surui.  Normally when groups line up a model for me order for me to do a live demonstration, it tends to be a pretty normal person.   I was very excited to have such a captivating girl as my model.

I had a very limited amount of time to photograph her, and didn’t have the best backgrounds to work with either, and had to really improvise with other areas of the room to create better backgrounds. I’m happy with how these turned out but would have loved to have had more time on this shoot.  😉

Because of the tight schedule, I didn’t get the chance to get out and photograph a lot for myself.  But Louis and I did take one morning to go walking and photographing people for about a half hour after breakfast.  I didn’t get a lot of what most people would consider as art prints, but I did get a lot of very interesting images because everything was so different than what we are used to here in America.

Keep in mind that we were in all of the biggest cities in China too, the smallest having 15 Million people and the largest having 36 Million people.  In comparison, my entire state of Utah has only 2.7 Million people.  So needless to say, these cities were very dense and very dirty.

I really like this old man framed by the public street toilet.  And this next image is very strange!  I found it very interesting all of the things that were just laying on the streets and in such interesting ways too.

And here is a little boy playing outside his house.  I really is interesting to see such vast extremes so close to each other in China.  In each city we stayed in absolutely top of the line hotels.  But literally just across the street would be pure poverty like I’ve never seen before.

This image to me really shows the contrast.  I framed it so that the old and impoverished woman is in the strongest part of the photograph.  Surrounding her on both sides are some young, beautiful mannequins and some fancy stores.  She is actually sitting in front of her home, the little door between the two stores.

The constant extremes were everywhere.

And here is a man working on the street, as most people do there.  He was a cobbler, and would fix and resole shoes.  You can see his sewing machine with a shoe hanging in it.  The little parts of people on the edges of the image are people waiting for their shoes.

There’s a lot more to tell you about China, but I’ll finish it in the next post.