crossing paradise - Longji ... faces

what's auntie cad cooking?

longji rice terraces,

longsheng, guangxi, china

august 2016

one of our days at longji was spent with memo-graphing the locals in their daily life. it was a great experience to get up close and personal like this, rather than the typical paid-visit, watching performances etc.

our guest house's host family happened to be our subject of the day.

we waited for a while at the common area of the guest house, after had a big breakfast prepared by izz and the group - nasi goreng, mee goreng, telur dadar etc. then came the kids, woke up and wandering around the house, happily waiting to be fed by their elders for the first meal of the day.

syu-ha, as we were told to call the little girl, was a friendly little girl that not afraid of us, stranger. probably the family business - running the guest house, exposed her to the world of strangers.
it was time for the photoshoot, as the grandmother done feeding the little ones for breakfast. we were brought to the building behind our guest house. the session began!

the grandmother was the first subject for the session. she dressed up in the traditional yao's women costume and began doing her work - weaving on the wooden loom. well...coming from terengganu, i've seen this a lot..the local ladies weaving songket, hence i didn't feel that it was that engaging to see the work completed. #i'veseenbetter eh? hehe.

we had the ladies of the house from 3 generations - the grandmother, the mother and the daughter, in their traditional Yao's women costume, ready for the memo-graph. every single corners of the house became our spot, to have them posed for us for the photo-shoot.

it took about more than an hour. the time that we spent memo-graphing the ladies of Yao in that house. it was  good session, in my opinion. it took me to engage back with the lessons learnt about playing with the composition and light, to get a good environmental portrait. 

we had another session in the afternoon. well...the actual plan was to get one of the local old man that we met to be in his costume, but apparently he unable to bought the idea of the request. we walked and wandered around the village and met and old lady at one of the grocery shops, and asked our guide to ask her if she was ok to be photographed. she was delighted and took us back to her house and we spent time that late afternoon memo-graphing her. of course, everything has to come with tips. no free lunch eh!..

we left the old lady, and walked back towards our hotel and met an old man, that was enjoying his pipe with his buddy. well..another subject for us. we asked andy to ask him, and he was ok and not hesitate to pose for us. i mean we asked him to move around, stand etc. not and objection came from him. and the tip? well...cigarette from one of our guys. hehehe.

it was a long day, but well spent. we had another photo-review session after we had dinner, like the night before.