So it’s been a while since I last blogged. A lot as happened in the past five years. One major change is that I’m now a photographer in Taipei. When I asked someone who had assisted commercial photographers in Taipei what they would do in my position, an experienced photographer, relatively new to Taiwan, they replied, “I’d post stuff on Threads”. So I’ve started to do that, but there’s a lot of material that couldn’t fit into my recent post, so I’ll drop it here.

I thought I may as well begin my post on some of my Taiwan photography way back in 2013. I shot this on assignment at the Yanshui Beehive Rocket Festival for an in flight magazine.

Little did I know, that I’d move to Taiwan on a Gold Card arts/culture employment visa 11 years later and that a large print of this photo would be on the wall of my apartment in Taipei. The first day of the festival is kicking off in Yanshui, in southern Taiwan, north of Tainan as I write this.

In case you haven’t heard of this festival, it’s a religious celebration where thousands of rockets are fired into a crowd to greet the 15th day of the Lunar New Year. It dates back from a bubonic plague 130 years ago.

As for the photo, it was shot from the back of one of those little blue trucks you see all over Taiwan. I can tell you that those rockets really do hurt when they hit. The rocket broke the skin, but fortunately, not my camera.

A Canadian photographer told me that his camera had suffered a direct hit on a previous visit, which had obliterated both lens and camera. It was probably a good idea to shoot side-on as the rockets flew.

I returned to Yanhui to cover the festival for CNN Travel a few years later, but I couldn’t capture an image better than this one.

A side note: I still have a couple of knives made by Yanshui’s local blacksmith. The first knife I bought was standard chefs knife. When I returned on my next visit I was surprised to see a photo of myself inside the shop with the caption, “Australian journalist buys knife”. I wonder if the shop is still around and whether its way now has two photos of me buying kitchen knives.