'Ade'2
Hunjiang
With frost on its smoke deflectors, an unidentified JS heads north from Hunjiang across the frozen river with a rake of empties, 08:28, 10.01.2001.
This visit to China was made with Gordon and although we had both visited China before, this was our first fully independent trip. It was quite an eye opener in proving that you don't always need to travel with a group or a guide. The weather was also eye opening in that it was the coldest winter I've spent in China with early morning temperatures in the minus forties, something I certainly wasn't adequately prepared for. But an eye closer in another respect - with all but the eyes covered up, our breath would condense on our eyelashes meaning that after a few blinks, the upper and lower eyelashes would freeze together and we couldn't see! We ate like horses but I still lost weight.
The weather took its toll on my camera gear too. I was using two Mamiya 645s - one with slide film and the other black & white. The standard lens on the slide film camera soon developed a 'lazy iris', meaning it didn't shut down to the correct aperture when the shutter was fired. As there was no indication of this fault, I never set the lens to manual, which would have alleviated the problem. Given the snowy conditions this led to gross overexposure of over half of the slides, and led to a personal meltdown when I got the results back home! This in mind, I was and still am so relieved that this photo didn't suffer that fate. We had planned to return here the following winter but got news during that visit that it had gone diesel a couple of weeks earlier, so we went elsewhere.
The view from this hill has changed somewhat since 2001 as a dual carriageway has been constructed which crosses the river in front of the railway bridge. The railway has changed too. No longer a branch line, it has been extended and is now an important through line to the North East.
Hunjiang
With frost on its smoke deflectors, an unidentified JS heads north from Hunjiang across the frozen river with a rake of empties, 08:28, 10.01.2001.
This visit to China was made with Gordon and although we had both visited China before, this was our first fully independent trip. It was quite an eye opener in proving that you don't always need to travel with a group or a guide. The weather was also eye opening in that it was the coldest winter I've spent in China with early morning temperatures in the minus forties, something I certainly wasn't adequately prepared for. But an eye closer in another respect - with all but the eyes covered up, our breath would condense on our eyelashes meaning that after a few blinks, the upper and lower eyelashes would freeze together and we couldn't see! We ate like horses but I still lost weight.
The weather took its toll on my camera gear too. I was using two Mamiya 645s - one with slide film and the other black & white. The standard lens on the slide film camera soon developed a 'lazy iris', meaning it didn't shut down to the correct aperture when the shutter was fired. As there was no indication of this fault, I never set the lens to manual, which would have alleviated the problem. Given the snowy conditions this led to gross overexposure of over half of the slides, and led to a personal meltdown when I got the results back home! This in mind, I was and still am so relieved that this photo didn't suffer that fate. We had planned to return here the following winter but got news during that visit that it had gone diesel a couple of weeks earlier, so we went elsewhere.
The view from this hill has changed somewhat since 2001 as a dual carriageway has been constructed which crosses the river in front of the railway bridge. The railway has changed too. No longer a branch line, it has been extended and is now an important through line to the North East.