I’ve been asked to give a speech (and show some of my photos) at the opening ceremony of this year’s Ensemble photographic exhibition. I decided to talk about my visits to the Yixian Photography Festivals over the last 3 years as this fits nicely in with the theme of a photographic exhibition.
While preparing my speech I found (with nostalgia) my photos of my 2 visits to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain). Huangshan is just about 60km north of Yixian County.
Yixian is in the Anhui province in China.
My first visit to the mountain was in 2013. When I received the invitation to exhibit some of my landscape photos at the Yixian photo festival, I did some research to learn more about Yixian and its surroundings and then found – to my delight – that Huangshan is very close to Yixian.
Photographing Huangshan is one of my bucket list destinations – I obviously could not visit Yixian and not the Mountain!
The mountain peaks and high possibility of mist is just any landscape photographer’s dream come true. According to Wikipeadia, James Cameron (director of the 2009 film Avatar) mentioned Huangshan as one of his influences in designing that fictional world.
I changed my planned trip to include a 3 day visit to Huangshan before the photo festival started.
Huangshan is known for its carved stone steps into the sides of the mountains. There are more than 60,000 steps throughout the area and based on the state of my legs after that first visit I recond I have climbed at least 50,000 of them! The photo above shows some of the steps.
For those of you who cannot see the steps, below is a mark-up to point out some of the steps. (And I climbed them with my bag, camera backpack and tripod!) Each arrow points to some stairs or railings. The one arrow even points to a cave like hole in the mountain where we had to crawl through to the next higher level!)
The stairs goes around and over mountains!
The bridge below is known as the Fairy Walking Bridge. The bridge as a link between two peaks with a gorge below that is at least 1000 meters deep!
The clouds and mist really makes for good monochrome photos.
Most local (non photographer) people visit Huangshan just to see the sunrise.
Obviously, as a photographer, I found the crowd of sun-worshipers quite annoying and decided to find a better scene to photograph and then, when I turned around, I saw this amazing scene, right behind them!
In 2015, while attending my third Yixian photo festival, a local friend phoned me one afternoon during our lunch break and informed me that they are on their way to Huangshan. He did not really ask if I wanted to come along, he just informed me - he knew I would not let the chance of revisiting Huangshan pass me by!
Fifteen minutes later I met them in the foyer of the hotel, packed for an overnight stay!
This time, the weather was very different – we had a cloudless sunrise. I improvised to get some impactful photos by using a warmer in-camera white balance and also taking some infrared photographs.
If I can give you any advice for a Huangshan visit, it will be the following:
- Prepare yourself for many, many stairs. You will be very tired, even if you are very fit.
- It is colder on the mountain than what you may think. From the foot of the mountain to the topmost hiking trail, you will ascend at least 1300 meters. On our 2015 hike, the temperature in Yixian was about 23 degrees Celsius, while we had frost that next morning on the mountain!