All the Tea in China..
Yunnan Province, China 2005
We were in Yunnan in November. It was supposed to be a month of beautiful weather, but we had fog every morning and rain during the day. Luckily, it wasn’t cold and I could wear sandals and not have to wear wet shoes all day. I hate when that happens.
Shooting in the fog was new to me. I mean, we have fog here in southern California, but I never thought to photograph it. I was using film in 2005 and couldn’t imagine going digital but when I saw the other tourists checking their LCD screen to assess their shot, I instantly saw the value of digital. One of the men let me see his screen so I could try to figure out what to do.
I didn’t figure it out. I mean I was there to shoot the rice paddies and while some fog might be ok, fog was all we could see. Like all photo tourists, we shot and shot…no one wanted to be the first to give up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked on those shots and never been happy with them.
That was one trip where we were all photo crazy and we got up at 4 every morning to be at out destination before sunrise. We waited in vain. Sometimes little H’mong girls would come to visit us. Their mothers had dressed them in their H’mong clothes and given them a basket of boiled eggs to sell to us. The girls were determined to sell every egg. They repeated whatever they were saying over and over so that we bought the eggs just to have them be quiet.
Our guide was Chinese. Chinese people like to eat. He’d stop the car if we passed a village bakery to buy fresh dumplings for us. Eating dumplings while driving in the darkness made getting out of a warm bed worth while.
What did I decide to do about the fog in my pictures? I decided to add to it with my Nik Color Efex Pro. I tried to make it enhance my scene, rather like “a woman in a filmy gown is more attractive than a naked one”. Well, that is what they said back in the day. I didn’t make that up!