Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

It’s been a long day! I started shooting around 9:30 this morning, and just got back now. It’s just after midnight and I’m ready to finally pack it in. This was my full day in China, and I felt rewarded with this gorgeous weather. After I shot those blue sky photos from the previous entry, Dad and I departed to explore the city a bit. We hit a hutong neighborhood, which is a classic Chinese residential area built in a series of alleys. I’m caught off guard by things that make perfect sense to the very pragmatic Chinese, like a leg of pork hanging to dry with the laundry. I mean, why not?

We wandered for hours, eventually finding ourselves in a major tourist area and then at a bus stop. After studying the various out-of-date maps posted for everyone’s inconvenience, we worked out how to get back to the hostel on the bus. I find these little adventures to be rewarding.

Dinner tonight was Peking duck. No visit to Beijing would be complete without the city’s famous roast duck recipe. The food was so good last night that we decided to eat at the same restaurant again. The chef and owner of this restaurant clearly appreciates that having good Chinese food doesn’t mean you need to have a dismal dining experience to go along with it. The presentation and service were top-notch, and the price was very reasonable. There was even a dude who stood by our table and patiently wrapped and served us the traditional “duck burritos” that are an essential part of the Peking duck experience. I remembered to bring my camera this time. No, the wriggling still-alive scorpion skewers are not from our dinner. They were from a local street-food market. I was gratified to note that everyone, including domestic Chinese tourists seemed grossed out by the scorpions.

Immediately after dinner, I set out to the Olympic park to try again at shooting the “Birds Nest” stadium and “Water Cube” aquatics centre. This time, I had better luck and managed to score a few shots of these iconic structures. That’s good, because between walking and the subway, it’s about two hours each way to get to the Olympic park.

Now it’s time for bed. I’m leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. More thoughts about China later.

I did a little walking around Beijing today. During the day, the smog is astounding. China has made some truly impressive efforts to reduce pollution and energy consumption, and the message is constantly hammered home by the media: use less energy and water, live in harmony with the environment, use public transit. However, the fact remains that there are just too many people here, and despite the fact that each person uses far less than we do in North America, the cumulative effect of so many crammed into such a small space is catastrophic to air quality. Anyway, as it pertains to me, it’s hard to take photos during the day, because everything more than 50 feet from you is shrouded in a hazy white veil.

Tonight after a delicious and artfully prepared meal at a restaurant down the street (sorry, I wasn’t expecting it to be so good, so no photos), I went out to see what I could shoot. I decided to hop on the subway and try to get myself over to the Olympic park to have some fun with all those celebrity buildings, like the National Stadium. I’m truly amazed at the changes to the subway system in the last two years. When I was here in 2007, I had to battle a crowd to get to this little cage containing a woman selling paper tickets. You then had to battle a crowd to get to a guy who would punch a hole in the ticket and let you down the stairs to the trains. There were four very limited subway lines open, covering a small part of the city. That’s all changed. Now, you buy your re-usable plastic subway tickets from a bank of bilingual touch-screen terminals, and pass through automated gates to get to the trains. There are nine lines now, with 147 stations all over the city. The cost has also changed. Instead of three to five Yuan (about 50-80 cents) that it cost in 2007, it’s now 2 Yuan (about 36 cents) to ride anywhere this massive system goes. According to Wikipedia, the system is still under massive expansion, with plans to double its current size by 2012. This is why I’m baffled that Toronto can’t build proper public transit to Pearson airport. It’s all about priorities.

So, I rode the subway for quite a long time, transferring a couple of times to get to Olympic park. It took about an hour to get there because it’s pretty far, and I kept missing my connecting trains. By the time I arrived at the Olympic park station, it was about 9:35pm. I was surprised to discover that the Olympic park closes at 9:30pm, so I was just in time to see the security guards let the last people out, and slam the gate shut. Also, it started raining.

I chalked it up to experience, and comforted myself in that I’d at least figured out where the airport express subway line started, and headed back to the hostel. When I came out of the subway, the rain had pretty much stopped. The reflections of the buildings in the wet pavement made me feel like doing some long exposures. Earlier in the night, I’d been shooting this old church that was sandwiched between a giant hotel and a mega-ultra-modern department store in the busy Wangfujing shopping area. It looked amazing reflected in the wet pavement.

Just as I was getting into shooting this, and finding some interesting angles, someone abruptly turned out all the lights on the building. It took a moment for me to realize how awesome this was. I truly believe that to get great night shots, you have to shoot what seems impossible to shoot. There are so many photographers who can easily recognize the photographic potential of brightly lit night scenes, and will get out the tripod to take some very ordinary shots. However, I want to make it my mission to capture those rarest of photons, because the fewer there are, the more potential they have to make night photos that really shine. After the lights went out, those remarkable photons were reflecting off of the moving clouds, creating a surreal backdrop. The sparse light from the shops across the street provided ample fill for the building itself, even though the scene at the time looked almost totally dark.

I only have one more night left here in China before I head over to Thailand. In some ways, this trip has seemed to have flown by so fast. In other ways, I feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. In either case, I’ve done my best to make it memorable.