Fishing boats in the southern Taiwan port of Donggang.

A staple of good documentary storytelling, a photoessay exists to communicate a story through a sequence of images based around a common theme. If you think of the entire photoessay like a news article, then the individual images have to be like the sentences or paragraphs in a written work. A photoessay can contain words itself, but only to clarify the content of the images, much in the way that photographs clarify the content of a written essay. A photographic essay is a form of visual communication. The photographer should go into it with a plan or idea about what it is they wish to convey. This idea may evolve as the essay is shot, but it is essential to have in order to begin. Approaching a photo essay without a plan will usually be evident to the viewer, as it won’t seem as cohesive as it should.

Before we go any further, let me remind you that my eBook Tips, Tricks and Pics is available to purchase for $5.

A strong photographic essay will show the photographer connecting with what is being shot. This connection may be achieved through prior research, on the scene observation, questioning, clarifying and often becoming emotionally involved in some way, all the while trying to remain an objective observer. Photo essays can be powerful tools for communication if done well; equally, they can cause viewers to gloss over serious issues if handled poorly.

The most common theme for photo essays is humanity and the lives of people. Look for somebody or a group who have an engaging story to tell. It doesn’t have to be globally significant. In fact, for most viewers, local issues will probably resonate more than worldwide ones. Once you have found the story you want to tell, you need to decide how to tell it.

Unloading tuna at the southern Taiwan port of Donggang

You’re probably going to want to open with a strong, establishing shot. This conveys a sense of place and possibly time that allows the viewer to know the location that the subject exists in. It needs to be striking enough to attract the viewer’s attention. Once this sense of place is established, the photographer should seek to place the subjects into the location. You are not looking for detailed close-ups at this point, rather seek out middle distance type shots. These serve to place humans into the scene and draw the viewer further into the story.

From there, it’s time to move further in. This is where portraits come into play. You may choose to offer a mixture of environmental portraits shot from various angles and distances or standard head and shoulders portraits. It is with these portraits that the viewer will probably find the greatest connection to the subjects. They (the viewers) should get a sense that you have connected with the subjects, that the subjects have allowed you into their lives. From there, you can seek out significant detail and move in for detailed closeups which will pull the viewer further into the story. To conclude the photo essay, you may wish to seek out a clincher image. This is one that will allow the viewers to walk away with the emotion that you want to convey.

Preparing to make sashimi. Donggang, Taiwan

Once you’ve completed the shooting part of the essay, the task of editing and presenting your work begins. This is often the most difficult aspect of creating a photo essay as poor editing has probably ruined more photo essays than poor photography. It often helps here if you have someone else you can work with at this point. If the photography itself was particularly demanding and emotional, it may be hard to objectively select the strongest images that tell the story best. Ask any editors you know, or your photography friends to give you some advice.

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This week on 5 we’re going to look at a few tips for creating photo essays. Humans are naturally drawn to stories and with a little planning, you can create your own photo essay that will wow family, friends and strangers. A photoessay is simply a series of photographs put together that tell a story. So let’s look at creating one.

1. Choose A Topic

The first step is to decide what it is you want to present to the world. A photoessay doesn’t need to be hard-hitting news stories, or documentary photos of the rich and famous. It can be anything, from some local history, to a travel feature, to a relatives birthday, to a trip to a new restaurant. The key is that is has to be interesting to you.

Photoessays will typically fall within one of two categories – narrative or thematic. Narrative photoessays present a series of images in chronological order showcasing a person or activity over time, whereas thematic essays focus on a theme and show photographs relative to that theme. The following image is from a thematic type photo essay “Cambodia’s Forgotten Kingdom“.

2. Research

Once you’ve decided on your topic and its style, it’s time to do some research. Talk to some local historians if you’re focusing on local history, interview family members if the story is about them, read articles and guidebooks if you are doing a travel essay, talk to the chef and waiters if you’re looking at restaurants. Anything that’s related to your topic can be used as a point of research. In my look at Cosplay, I took a single cosplay event and looked into the history of the subculture to give me some extra ideas.

3. The Real Story

After you’ve done some research, you’re now ready to start planning out your photoessay. Go beyond the basics and look for an angle to draw the viewer in. Is there some connection between your hometown and the exotic travel destination you’ve decided to shoot? Does the new restaurant use locally produced produce? Is your family member celebrating a successful achievement or battling a disease? Looking further into the story can help broaden its appeal and make it speak on a deeper level.

4. Find The Emotion

Successful photo essays have one thing in common – emotion. They provoke an emotional response in the viewer. Fear. Joy. Anger. Sorrow. Conveying the emotion in the first images is essential in order to hook the viewer and make them want to keep looking. This is often the most difficult part of the essay, as everyone will react differently. In the photo below, KMT supporters celebrate as their candidate Ma Ying-jeou is declared winner of the 2008 presidential elections in Taiwan.

5. Plan Your Shots And Presentation.

The final point relates to both the shots you take and the way you lay the essay out. Before shooting, walk around the area, pre-visualize any shots you might want to include and look around for both small details and large, mood-setting type images. When laying out the essay, aim to start with a powerful lead photo that draws the viewer in, a second photo that describes the general scene or theme, portrait and action shots if people are present should come next, followed by finer details, closeups and the like. Finally, use a summing up type photo as the penultimate image to wrap the story up, and finish with a clincher photo, designed to leave your viewer with the emotion you want them to walk away with such as the following one from the pod village at San-zhr.

The final flashpoint of the Chinese civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, Kinmen is a small island under Taiwanese control but located 2km off the coast of Fujian province, China.

From 1949, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Chinese cannons pounded Kinmen with over one million rounds. The earliest fighting took place on the Kuningtou battlefield, where, in a battle lasting 56 hours, 15000 lives were lost. A later major battle was the 823 artillery barrage, which lasted 44 days and had the US Air Force preparing for a nuclear strike against the People’s Republic of China.

Today, with easing of tensions between the Taiwan (ROC) and China (PRC), Kinmen has become a popular tourist destination. It is still home to a substantial number of Taiwanese soldiers, but there are also a lot of unused and abandoned miltary sites. Here a few abandoned, eroded bunkers and tunnels.

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The final flashpoint of the Chinese civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, Kinmen is a small island under Taiwanese control but located 2km off the coast of Fujian province, China.

From 1949, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Chinese cannons pounded Kinmen with over one million rounds. The earliest fighting took place on the Kuningtou battlefield, where, in a battle lasting 56 hours, 15000 lives were lost. A later major battle was the 823 artillery barrage, which lasted 44 days and had the US Air Force preparing for a nuclear strike against the People’s Republic of China.

Today, with easing of tensions between the Taiwan (ROC) and China (PRC), Kinmen has become a popular tourist destination. It is still home to a substantial number of Taiwanese soldiers, but there are also a lot of unused and abandoned miltary sites. Here a few abandoned, eroded bunkers and tunnels.

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For those who fancy themselves as superheroes or comic book characters, cosplay is the answer. Short for costume play, Cosplay was originally a Japanese subculture that began in the 1970s which featured people dressing as characters from anime, manga, tokasatsu and video games. As it’s grown and spread to other countries, it’s added some local flavor, with characters from Taiwanese puppet theater, Star Wars, American Civil War just a few of the accepted additions to the subculture.

The term cosplay was coined by Nov Takahashi in 1984 while attending Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention. Unlike simply dressing up in a Superman costume as a kid might do, cosplayers seek to become the character. As a result, elaborate costumes are made, with careful attention to detail to ensure that everything is perfect, right down to the color of the stitching.

In Taiwan, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) once cosplayed as Heihachi Edajima, a character from the manga series Sakigake!! Otokojuku. While it may appeal to presidents, most people think it’s kind of silly and in Japan today it has negative sexual connotations associated with it.

Last weekend, Petit Fancy 8 was held at National Taiwan University’s Sports Center. Along with David, Darren and Todd, I spent a couple of hours there, shooting the cosplayers in some beautiful, sunny weather. When we arrived there weren’t so many people, but it quickly got crowded with characters, photographers and curious onlookers.

I’m not even going to try and identify who the characters are supposed to be. With the exception of Batman, Flintstones and the Simpsons, I’m pretty much clueless about cartoon characters. The next big cosplay event will be at the same place on July 26-27.

For a full photo gallery from Petit Fancy 8, take a look here.

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Fireworks madness from the Mazu Festival. Don’t forget to take a look at previous posts detailing the origins of the Mazu Pilgrimage and images from the first 2 days of this years festival. Also, check out the complete gallery of Mazu images from which these few highlights are taken.

I’ll have another series of photos from the Mazu pilgrimage later in the week, so stay tuned.

Saturday April 5th saw the start of the 2008 Mazu Pilgrimage. Among the many gods and goddesses worshipped in Taiwan, Mazu, the Goddess of the Sea is perhaps the most revered. Every year, in the 3rd month of the lunar calendar, the Dajia Mazu, which is housed at the Zhenlan temple, is taken out on a pilgrimage lasting 8 days and covering 300km. Over the course of the 8 days, more than 1 million people will come out to see Mazu as she makes her way from Dajia to Hsingang in Jiayi county and back again, visiting more than 80 temples. It is thought that the Mazu pilgrimage is one of the three largest religious festivals in the world. Last year I wrote a detailed post describing the history of Mazu. Rather than rewrite it today, I’ll point you here for a look at the orgins of Mazu. This post will just be some images from the first 2 days of this years festival, with photos from Dajia’s Zhenlan Temple and Changhua’s Nan Yao Temple.

I’ll be posting more images over the next week as the pilgrimage takes place. In the meantime, the complete gallery can be seen at my www.craigfergusonimages.com

In 1967, Venerable Master Hsing Yun purchased 30 hectares of land in Dashu , a small town in Kaohsiung county and founded the Foguangshan Monastery. During the groundbreaking ceremony on May 16th, Master Hsing Yun established the following objectives.

Spread the Dharma through culture.

Cultivate human talents through education.

Benefit society through philanthropy.

Purify the mind through cultivation of awareness.

Born in Jiangsu, China on July 22, 1927, under the name Li Guoshen ,Venerable Master Hsing Yun was ordained at the age of 12 under the Dharma names Jinjue ( to be enlightened today) and Wuche (through enlightenment) at the Qixia Monastery in Nanjing, China. In the mid 1940s, he gave himself the Dharma name Hsing Yun, and in 1949 left China for Taiwan. He immediately began propogating the Dharma, through education, publications and radio broadcasts. His first book, Singing in Silence, was published in 1949, and in 1955 he published one of the first hardback biographies of the Buddha. Following the establishment of Foguangshan, he served as abbot until 1985 and established Buddha’s Light International Association (BLIA) in 1992.

Located an hour away from Kaohsiung, Foguangshan is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan, with its 36m high statue of Amithaba Buddha surrounded by 480 smaller statues being its most famous feature. The official motto of the monastery is

“May the Buddha’s Light shine upon the ten directions. May the Dharma stream continuously flow towards the five great continents.”

In addition to the complex at Foguangshan, a further 57 temples in Taiwan and 95 overseas are part of Foguangshan. The ordained Sangha numbers over 1300, and while the number of lay disciples under BLIA is hard to determine, it has been suggested that there may be as many as 1-3 million globally. In Taiwan, BLIA is the largest Buddhist organization, with approximately 400 000 members with KMT chairman Wu Po-hsiung serving as the second president of BLIA Taiwan.

Foguangshan emphasizes education and service, maintaining public universities, Buddhist colleges, libraries, publishing houses, translation centers, Buddhist art galleries, teahouses, and mobile medical clinics worldwide. The order has also established a children’s home, retirement home, high school and television station.

In contrast to the majority of Buddhist associations, Foguangshan employs a democratic system for choosing the abbot of the monastery. The current abbot, Venerable Hsin Pei , born in Penghu in 1970, is the seventh abbot of Foguangshan. Although he is the fourth person to hold the position, he is considered the seventh abbot as an abbot’s term lasts for 6 years. He was ordained in 1990 under the guidance of Venerable Master Hsin Yun, and initially given the Dharma name Hui Han.

Foguangshan’s order of precedence is a sequential hierarchy of nominal importance of monks, nuns, and laity. One’s position in an order of precedence is not necessarily an indication of functional importance, but rather an indication of ceremonial or historical relevance. Of particular importance is length of monastic ordination, a notion relevant to Buddhism as a whole. The current order is as follows.

1. Founder and head teacher (Ven. Master Hsin Yun).

2. Abbot (Most Ven. Hsin Pei).

3. Former Abbots.

4. Members of Foguangshan Religious Affairs Committee, a nine member elected council.

5. Senior Monastics.

6. Abbots and Abbesses of branch temples.

7. BLIA World Board of Directors.

8. BLIA Chapter Presidents.

9. BLIA Members.

Foguangshan offers a variety of meditation retreats, including one-day, weekend, and five-day programs, which are open to the public. Graduates of the short retreats can sign up for the 49-day retreat. The monastery offers many other programs for lay people, including chanting retreats, monastic retreats, and calligraphy retreats, also of varying length. Visitors can also tailor programs to their own needs, experiencing different aspects of monastery life.

Foguangshan receives about 70,000 visitors per month, of all kinds, including pilgrims, participants, and sightseers. The monastery has a live-in population of about 3,000, and includes a high school, a male college and a female college, an orphanage, and several hundred monks and nuns. The monastery also has an art museum, called the Culture Exhibition Hall, which features general Chinese art and calligraphy, nicely displayed. Another hall, the Buddhist Cultural Museum, has a valuable collection of antique Buddha statues. The art is not strictly for entertainment – it is also supposed to beautify and enrich the mind.

And so we come to the end of this post. As usual, I’ll leave you with a few more images. Enjoy.

In 1967, Venerable Master Hsing Yun purchased 30 hectares of land in Dashu , a small town in Kaohsiung county and founded the Foguangshan Monastery. During the groundbreaking ceremony on May 16th, Master Hsing Yun established the following objectives.

Spread the Dharma through culture.

Cultivate human talents through education.

Benefit society through philanthropy.

Purify the mind through cultivation of awareness.

Born in Jiangsu, China on July 22, 1927, under the name Li Guoshen ,Venerable Master Hsing Yun was ordained at the age of 12 under the Dharma names Jinjue ( to be enlightened today) and Wuche (through enlightenment) at the Qixia Monastery in Nanjing, China. In the mid 1940s, he gave himself the Dharma name Hsing Yun, and in 1949 left China for Taiwan. He immediately began propogating the Dharma, through education, publications and radio broadcasts. His first book, Singing in Silence, was published in 1949, and in 1955 he published one of the first hardback biographies of the Buddha. Following the establishment of Foguangshan, he served as abbot until 1985 and established Buddha’s Light International Association (BLIA) in 1992.

Located an hour away from Kaohsiung, Foguangshan is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan, with its 36m high statue of Amithaba Buddha surrounded by 480 smaller statues being its most famous feature. The official motto of the monastery is

“May the Buddha’s Light shine upon the ten directions. May the Dharma stream continuously flow towards the five great continents.”

In addition to the complex at Foguangshan, a further 57 temples in Taiwan and 95 overseas are part of Foguangshan. The ordained Sangha numbers over 1300, and while the number of lay disciples under BLIA is hard to determine, it has been suggested that there may be as many as 1-3 million globally. In Taiwan, BLIA is the largest Buddhist organization, with approximately 400 000 members with KMT chairman Wu Po-hsiung serving as the second president of BLIA Taiwan.

Foguangshan emphasizes education and service, maintaining public universities, Buddhist colleges, libraries, publishing houses, translation centers, Buddhist art galleries, teahouses, and mobile medical clinics worldwide. The order has also established a children’s home, retirement home, high school and television station.

In contrast to the majority of Buddhist associations, Foguangshan employs a democratic system for choosing the abbot of the monastery. The current abbot, Venerable Hsin Pei , born in Penghu in 1970, is the seventh abbot of Foguangshan. Although he is the fourth person to hold the position, he is considered the seventh abbot as an abbot’s term lasts for 6 years. He was ordained in 1990 under the guidance of Venerable Master Hsin Yun, and initially given the Dharma name Hui Han.

Foguangshan’s order of precedence is a sequential hierarchy of nominal importance of monks, nuns, and laity. One’s position in an order of precedence is not necessarily an indication of functional importance, but rather an indication of ceremonial or historical relevance. Of particular importance is length of monastic ordination, a notion relevant to Buddhism as a whole. The current order is as follows.

1. Founder and head teacher (Ven. Master Hsin Yun).

2. Abbot (Most Ven. Hsin Pei).

3. Former Abbots.

4. Members of Foguangshan Religious Affairs Committee, a nine member elected council.

5. Senior Monastics.

6. Abbots and Abbesses of branch temples.

7. BLIA World Board of Directors.

8. BLIA Chapter Presidents.

9. BLIA Members.

Foguangshan offers a variety of meditation retreats, including one-day, weekend, and five-day programs, which are open to the public. Graduates of the short retreats can sign up for the 49-day retreat. The monastery offers many other programs for lay people, including chanting retreats, monastic retreats, and calligraphy retreats, also of varying length. Visitors can also tailor programs to their own needs, experiencing different aspects of monastery life.

Foguangshan receives about 70,000 visitors per month, of all kinds, including pilgrims, participants, and sightseers. The monastery has a live-in population of about 3,000, and includes a high school, a male college and a female college, an orphanage, and several hundred monks and nuns. The monastery also has an art museum, called the Culture Exhibition Hall, which features general Chinese art and calligraphy, nicely displayed. Another hall, the Buddhist Cultural Museum, has a valuable collection of antique Buddha statues. The art is not strictly for entertainment – it is also supposed to beautify and enrich the mind.

And so we come to the end of this post. As usual, I’ll leave you with a few more images. Enjoy.

Alishan (Mt Ali) in the mountains east of Jiayi is one of Taiwan’s top tourist destinations. High mountain tea, panoramic vistas and 1000 year old forests are all must-see attractions in the area, but perhaps the most famous attraction of all is the Alishan Forest Railway .

The railway system is an 86km network of narrow gauge (762mm) tracks that runs from Jiayi to Alishan. The main line begins at Jiayi station at an elevation of 30m and ends at Alishan station (2216m). The route from Jiayi to Alishan sees the train cross 77 bridges, go through 49 tunnels, negotiate 1 spiral, 4 switchbacks and gradients as steep as 6.26% as it makes the 71km journey from the subtropical plains through temperate forest and into the sub-alpine mountains. The railway is one of only three of its type remaining in the world.

The earliest recorded narrow gauge railway was constructed in 1556 as a mining railway in the Czech Republic. Initially, all railways were mining railways and it wasn’t until the 17th century that railways were extended out of the mines and onto the surface, although they remained industrial, serving to connect mines to transportation points.

Narrow gauge railways are cheaper to construct, and are most often used in areas where the population density is too low to justify the cost of standard or broad gauge, or in mountainous terrain where the ease of construction and savings in engineering costs  are substantial. The downside is that they are limited in the amount of freight and passengers that can be carried.

The Alishan Forest Railway started life serving the logging industry. From 1895 until 1945, Taiwan was administered by Japan. As Japan’s first overseas colony, the Japanese government set out to make Taiwan a showpiece “model colony” and invested heavily in industry and public works.  In 1899 the Railway Ministry, predecessor to today’s TRA (Taiwan Railway Administration) was created and a rapid expansion of the island’s railways began, with the most notable achievement being the construction of the Western line, linking the major population centers on the west coast and reducing travel time between north and south to a single day.

In 1912, construction began on the Alishan railway, an industrial line to facilitate the logging of cypress and Taiwania, a coniferous tree native to East Asia that first became known to botanists in 1910 after it was discovered in Taiwan’s mountains. Taiwania is the largest tree in Asia, reported to heights of 80 m tall and with a trunk up to at least 3 m diameter. The leaves are needle-like or awl-like and 8-15 mm long on young trees up to about 100 years old, then gradually becoming more scale-like, 3-7 mm long, on mature trees. The cones are small, 15-25 mm long, with about 15-30 thin, fragile scales, each scale with two seeds. The species is now endangered due mainly to illegal logging in China, Burma and Vietnam.

Originally the railway used Shay locomotives built by Lima Locomotive Works of Ohio, USA. The Shay was named after Ephraim Shay (1839-1916) who designed and patented the geared steam locomotive.  Shay locomotives had regular fire-tube boilers offset to the left to leave room for a two or three cylinder “motor,” mounted vertically on the right with longitudinal drive shafts extending fore and aft from the crankshaft at wheel axle height. These shafts had universal joints and square sliding slip joints to accommodate motion of swiveling two axle trucks. Each axle was driven by a separate bevel gear and used no side rods. The Alishan railway first used 18 ton engines and later added 28 ton models to the fleet. A number of these have been preserved for display in various museums in Taiwan (and one in Australia); and one model, #26 built in 1914,  is still used on occasion for short tourist trips on the mountain.

Since the early 1960s, there have been 10 accidents on the Alishan Forest Railway, the worst of which occurred on March 1st, 2003, with 17 fatalities and 156 injuries. The accident occurred shortly after the train pulled out of Alishan station to begin its descent of the mountain.

“Three minutes after departing from Alishan Station, the train began traveling down a gradient. I felt clearly the train was speeding.  I tried desperately to stop the train but the brakes failed. Then the train rammed into the mountain side. I have worked as a train driver for more than 20 years. It was the first time I met this kind of situation,” the train’s driver, Tsai Chen-sun told reporters after the accident.

Chief prosecutor of Jiayi  Prosecutors’ Office, Luo Chien-hsun, said “The two drivers and the conductor did not check the condition of the stopcock carefully before leaving Alishan Station. That’s why the train’s brakes failed when the train was traveling down the gradient.” The Control Yuan ultimately found that human error was to blame. The trains engineer, co-engineer and maintenance technician failed to open the air switch valve of the brake pipe according to standard operating procedure. Furthermore, the train master did not confirm that the air brake connection work was completed.

Following the accident, the service was suspended while the investigation was carried out and  repairs and safety work were implemented. The Forestry Bureau was ordered to establish the Alishan Forest Railway Standard Operating Procedures and the Alishan Forest Railway Improvement Plan before approval was granted to reopen the line.

Today, Alishan is once again one of Taiwan’s premier mountain resorts and tourist destinations, seeing upwards of 10 000 visitors a day during peak season. To get a better feel for what travel used to be like, take a look at Extraordinary Journey on an Ordinary Train, first published in 1975. In the meantime, whether you’re a railway buff, hiker or just want to see the sea of clouds phenomena, start planning a getaway to Alishan today.

To view a lot more photos from Alishan, take a look at the Alishan gallery section of this site.