Around China with a Mamiya 6
Spectacular landscapes and interesting culture among the rice terraces of southern China
2001 seems like an age ago. No smart phones, no Instagram, no WhatsApp. Back then I spent a few days in Yangshuo in southern China, part of a month-long holiday travelling around the country with friends. 18 years later in May 2019 I had the chance to return.
I’d landed a 10-day commercial shoot in the nearby city of Guilin, so arranged to stay on for a few days afterwards to look around with my girlfriend Emma. It’s a beautiful part of the world, but I was also curious to see what had changed in the intervening years. As I was already carrying a heavy Pelican case with my work cameras and lenses, I needed to travel light. So once again I packed a couple of Mamiya 6 cameras and their three lenses. For a high quality travel kit it’s hard to beat.
My Mamiya 6 travel kit - 2 bodies and 3 lenses: 50mm, 75mm and 150mm
I’d arranged a guide through Mia at Guilin Photography Tours and I can highly recommend them. They’re not cheap, but if you’re time constrained they’re a great way to pack a lot of photogenic subjects into a short time. Our guide Lee was a super nice guy, knew some great locations and gave us a useful (and at times hilarious) insight into local Chinese culture along the way. Who knew that self-important local politicians were known as potatoes? And the ones in Beijing as big potatoes? I’m sure you’ll agree it’s important to know this kind of stuff!
Our first couple of days was a visit to the Longji rice terraces in Longjeng province, sometimes known in English as the Dragon’s Backbone. A couple of hours drive along the modern, almost deserted highway from Guilin and we were soon winding our way up a river valley on a dirt roads surrounded by mountains covered in dense bamboo forest. The area is home to the Yao ethnic group and we stopped off at one of the old wooden villages, walked through looking at the streets and houses and had tea with one of the families that lived there. They kept pigs under the house and used the porch to try grain from their tiny fields. They sold vegetables in the market and appeared to live a very simple life. The only sign of modern life was an old Nokia mobile phone.
Inside the house is was dark but there were a couple of windows creating some great light. I loaded some Portra 800 and mostly shot the Mamiya using the 80mm wide open at f/3.5 or f/ 4 to keep my shutter speed up to 1/30th or so. With no mirror slap it’s not hard to hand hold the Mamiya at these speeds but I had to be careful to catch static moments so I didn’t suffer from motion blur. In the kitchen the shutter dropped to 1/8th and I had to carefully brace the camera against the wall or sit on the floor and brace it against my knees, but my shots still came out sharp. It’s part of what makes the Mamiya such a great travel camera - try that on a Hasselblad!
Later in the afternoon we made our way to the rice terraces. When we arrived the principal lookout was empty and Lee took us for a short walk to another terrace off to one side. Just as well, as within a couple of hours as sunset approached the lookout became packed with tourists and photographers. We were very happy to be a couple of hundred meters away from the mayhem. I mostly shot on the 50mm and 80mm stopped down to f/11, trying to find patterns in the landscape and catch reflections in the terraces.
Once the sun had set we walked down in the twilight though the terraces to a small hotel in the village. The village is not accessible by car so we were carrying our overnight things with us. There had been a death in the village a few days before and the funeral was the next day. Fireworks went off throughout the night so we were pretty tired as we walked back down to the car the next day and headed to Yangshuo.
On the journey the landscape changed from mountains and ravines to rice paddies and karst mountains. Rising up like giant eggs from the otherwise flat fields, the mountains are formed from weathered limestone and look like something from James Cameron’s Avatar or a Vietnam war film.
Yangshuo had changed in the 18 years since I’d last visited. The town was more like a small city now and the landscape dotted with houses and hotels to a much greater degree than before, with solar panels were installed on the roofs of even the most humble dwellings. For someone from the UK it was strange to see what looked like the past and the future co-existing. While water buffalo ploughed the fields and farmers planted their rice by hand, in the local food market everyone rode on electric scooters and paid using WeChat on their smartphone.
We had one final morning with our guide to photograph the famous cormorant fishermen. We left at 4am to drive for an hour or so through the darkness and arrived on the banks of the river Li just as the sky was beginning to lighten. It had rained heavily the day before and the river had swollen, so that the area we had to stand on at the bottom of the steep bank was tiny. We were then joined by another guide with his 4 Chinese guests and suddenly we were in for a real squeeze! The Chinese photographers were all carrying state of the art equipment, including the new Fuji medium format camera, a Leica Q2 and a Hasselblad X1D. These guys were serious!
Two fishermen appeared through the gloom and began to pose with their cormorants and cast their nets. I hadn’t appreciated that the fishermen no longer work this way as the river has become too polluted to carry enough fish, so they now only perform for tourists. They were so used to posing for tourists it was hard to get them to behave naturally. So how do I feel about photographing something that was entirely set up? Well, in my working life as an advertising photographer almost everything I photograph is entirely set up. We choose the locations, choose the models, choose their clothes and direct them to get exactly what the client wants. Even in my early days as a travel photographer for magazines and guidebooks I would ask subjects to pose and we would get access to people wearing traditional dress etc. At the end of the day I am not a documentary photographer – my travel photos are exactly that, travel photos and not a documentary record. So I’m entirely comfortable with the situation but I can understand why others may not be.
I was right at the limit using the 50mm lens wide open on Porta 800, but managed to get some sharp shots. Emma shot alongside me on her Nikon FE2 and 50mm and I think some of hers maybe work even better. I also had a Contax T2 loaded with Kodak P3200 and there are a few shots here from that camera too. Which do you think are the most atmospheric? One of the criticisms some level at the Mamiya using modern films is that the lenses are so sharp and the film scans so grainless you may as well shoot digital. I still feel the pictures have a different look to them, but the pictures from the Nikon and the Contax are certainly show the film aesthetic much more strongly. I’ve heard I’ve included a ‘behind the scenes’ photo to show how crowded it was on our tiny river bank. Once the other guests discovered I was a working photographer they copied anything I did!
The next day we relaxed and then flew to Hong Kong – and that’s another story.
