This week is the one-year anniversary of coming to China in March of 2020. I came to Ningbo with the plan to stay for 6 weeks for a business trip. A few days after I arrived, China closed the borders (still not reopened a year later) and the Covid cases in the US spiked. After consulting with my company and family I decided to make this an extended trip because my company couldn’t send anyone to work with our factories for a very long time. My six-week trip slowly transformed into a 14-month odyssey. The timing of my trip could not have been better planned because I arrived as the Covid virus came under control in China and I was able to sit-out both the pandemic – as well as the brutal Minnesota winter.

My year in China was beneficial to my company, but it was an adventure and cultural immersion for me. I made lots of new friends on this trip – almost immediately. I met Matt and his family on the bus ride from the Shanghai airport a couple of hours after I landed! I made other new friends through photography. I shoot street photos with several young local photographers now.

As I look back and think about my experiences in China I feel lucky to have made the decision last year to get on a plane during the early days of a pandemic. It was very scary landing in Shanghai and immediately being surrounded by technicians wearing hazmat suits. I briefly regretted my decision, but soon realized I was on the “correct” side of the Pacific Ocean as the Covid virus began spreading rapidly across the US. The 14 days I spent in quarantine was miserable, but I found ways to make them productive.

During the last year, I’ve only shot analog film photos (except during the quarantine period). Weird? Yes. Expensive? Yes. Satisfying? Absolutely. I created a film processing lab in my AirBnB apartment and have been processing both black & white and color film for over 8 months. I scan all of the negatives with my Fuji XT-3 and complete the processing in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I’ve traveled to the Shanghai Camera Mall many times and bought a number of vintage film cameras to use for the several projects I’ve been working on in China. The “buy and try” strategy works well with analog cameras because their value is going up every year. I still use the Mamiya 6 for most of my analog photos, but during the last year I also acquired:

• Makina 67
• Panflex 6×12 panorama
• ShenHao 4″x5″
• Fuji GW690

The photos below are from February and March of 2021 and were taken in Ningbo, Shenzhen and Fenghua (peach blossoms).