Do you like to take photos in museums? It’s very challenging… To me, I like to try to take a photo of the actual museum or a photo of some art and its relation to the museum. I find taking photos just of the art itself to be a little boring. It seems so obvious… and it seems like kind of a disservice to the art itself, unless you are adding something new or seeing it in a new light. It depends on the art, of course. A photo of a painting always falls flat, but a photo of a statue can be interesting.
And so it was with the emperor here in the Capital Museum in Beijing.
Do you know how hard it was to get permission to use a tripod in here? It was very very hard. And, the permission part had to be in Chinese, which adds a whole new layer of complexity to the permission-gaining-process. But, luckily I had a little team there helping me out with this stuff, and that made life a lot easier. After all the paperwork was squared away and three redundant layers of government officials were satisfied, the light was perfect for this shot. I rushed over to take it before the ink was dry!