South China - Longji rice terraces

Here's some of the photos taken whilst we trekked across the Longji rice terraces in Longsheng county, Guangxi. Unfortunately it was pretty over cast and very hazy so the photos aren't anything fantastic but I hope they give some sense to the beauty of the place.

"TUESDAY 15th May

We were up very early today so that we could do our 4 to 5 hours trek through the Longji Rice Terraces. We managed to set off by 07.00 so that we would miss the midday heat of the Sun. It was an amazing trek, it was hard work at times though (with six steep hills to climb up), but definitely worth the views! Construction was started on the terraces 700 years ago and they were only finished in the early 1900s. It's just amazing to think and see that people do climb the hills every day to get to the terraces and other villages. It's such hard work, as most of the terraces aren't large enough to get an ox in, so they have to be farmed by hand - back breaking working we can assure you! The views were just spectacular looking over the vast areas that have been cultivated and seeing the Sun reflecting off of the flooded paddies. We finally made it to Dazai around 12.00! We had a banquet lunch and then spent the afternoon and evening watching DVDs and playing cards! Some people, including Steve, were not being lazy bones and decided to go to a couple of the view points near to the hotel we stayed at and so went for another hour of trekking!"

The Yao minority people farm the region along with Zhuang, the Yao women are well know for having some of the longest hair in the world (and they don't mind asking for it to be photographed in return for some Yuan!).

Farming these Rice terraces isn't easy (the minorities people were effectively "pushed" up the mountains so that the Han people could get the productive valleys) and with no roads a simple task like changing this broken electrical transformer after a power cut involves a lot of people power!

During our trek we were invited inside one of farmers houses to see what it was like, the place was very sparsely decorated to say the least but it was still interesting to see who's portrait they had on the wall.

Fireworks night 2007, Shuttleworth

I'd never tried firework photography before so I thought I'd give it a go this year at the show they put on at Shuttleworth. Despite using my crappy old tripod the pictures didn't turn out too bad, they were all taken on either Velvia 50 or Fuji PRO160 at approx f/8 with a cable release holding the shutter open for about 5-10 seconds each time (the darker shots are the Velvia ones). I'm not sure if I prefer the darker abstract images from the Veliva or the more conventional ones from the 160 speed film.

South China - Chengyang Part 2

Well, after announcing I was back in business my computer decided otherwise! It went on the complete go slow with the occasional blue screen of death as well, luckily I'd managed to back up all my important files onto my new hard drive a few days before. After trying a few attempts to fix the problem, which didn't get me anywhere, the only thing left to do was completely format my hard drive and reinstall windows. This was a lot easier than I expected, although not a quick process!

I finally finished sorting out the wedding photos I was working on and should be receiving the finished album from My Publisher any day now. Besides doing some photographic work for a few peoples Christmas presents this has left me some free time to try and sort some more of my travelling photos out, so here's another instalment of my visit to Chengyang.

I think these were all taken on same day (including the ones of the cultural show in a previous post), as we only spent two nights and only one day in the village, I'm quite surprised at how many photos I took! But in a place like that its pretty hard to put the camera down!

This is my first attempt at merging two photos together in Photoshop and I was very surprised how easy it was. It's two portrait frames of Ilford FP4 with my canon 50mm prime taken from the view point overlooking Chengyang, the resulting file is a meaty 30MP.

It was great to see lots Chinese artists in the village and not too many western tourists.

You can see the Wu's house where we stayed behind the bridge in this shot, which had a fairly impressive view of one of the best bridges in the area. Unfortunately it won't be there any more and has probably been turned into a tour bus car park.

This is one of villages meeting houses which are at the centre of each village.

This is inside one of the meeting hoses where the older generation (and a few of younger generation too) hangout and play cards etc. This is probably one of my all time favourite shots which shows one of the guys carving in the names of people who've made a contribution to the upkeep of the village meeting house.

This is another all time favourite too, with Harry playing with the kids and there interest in his digital camera.