Rapeseed season 2021

 

 

I am not a flower guy. The only flowers I can recognize are roses, lily, and sunflowers. After my first winter in China, I was blown away by all the yellow that I saw all around me and I had no idea what these flowers were but they seemed to be everywhere I looked. After asking a few Chinese friends and been told that they are rape flowers(which sounded very weird to me at the time) and I decided to look them up and do some digging into the little yellow flower.

 

 

As it turns out, rapeseed is a plant that is mostly grown by poor Chinese farmers during the early spring in China. Most of the farmers will harvest the plant to make oil that they will sell for cheap. So basically it is farmers using all the available land they can find to make some money. Of course, the term farmer is a little different in the west compared to China. In China, most farmers are extremely poor, they don’t own any land and use any free or available land that can find until they get chaced away but some local authorities.

 

 

But what I love is the sudden burst of color after a horrible grey winter. It is almost like an explosion of color which is sometimes extremely uplifting after a long cold winter. So as a photographer, I have been trying to document what I see but photography the farmers is not an easy task in China as they know that they are farming illegally on land that they do not own, so they hate their pictures been taken, especially by foreigners. Usually when I photography the farmers, I do it with a long lens but with the flowers, I really wanted to get up close and even shoot some video.

 

 

This year provided to be even more difficult to get some photos as Covid-19 made most Chinese people afraid of foreigners. The local Chinese media have been reporting that almost of cases of Covid are imported from other countries but they fail to report that the cases are Chinese people returning to China. So most of the local people in China think that it is foreigners who are spreading the virus in China, so most Chinese people are afraid to anywhere near a foreigner now.

 

 

I am not a street photographer so, to be honest, this really doesn’t affect me much, except for this little project that I have been chasing for the last few years. But all I can do in this situation in China right now is to shoot what I see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also shot a lot of film during these two weeks that the flowers were blooming but I have only developed the black and white film. I don’t have chemicals to develop the color film at the moment and since I have only shot two rolls of color film, it might be a long time before I develop those rolls.

 

 

I am not sure why I was shooting color film, I seldom shoot color film but I guess I kind of liked the idea of shooting some photos that I will not see for a long time. I won’t buy chemicals to develop the film until I have at least 10 rolls shots, and I have only shot three rolls now. I am out of color film now so I need to buy some more to go shooting with. I love black and white film though and I am always shooting some black and white film but this time, black and white is not great at capturing the rapeseed season in China.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love black and white shots and usually, I will say that color distracts from an image but I do think that this time, color tells a complete story with the images. The black and white images just lack the visual impact that I think the bright yellow rapeseed flowers give in an image. I am sorry that I didn’t get to shoot more videos of the rapeseed flowers this year, as that was my real goal but sometimes the best plans don’t go the way you want.

 

There is always next year, so if Covid-19 goes away, I might be luckier next time.

Shaun