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A Selection of Covers I have Photographed over the Years with Stories

 

Taking this photo at Tainan’s world renown Ten Drum Art Percussion Culture Park was a pleasure. It was part of an assignment for a photo essay on traditional performance troupes. I had worked with them before and they have always been accommodating and professional. I had two drummers to work with and set them up in a run down warehouse for an environmental shot showing a bit about their background; they bought and cleaned up a run-down sugar refinery for their center. It is now a thriving cultural business.

 

This cover shot of the Hla’alua (Salaua) Chief at a festival in Namasia. The chief passed away not long after the guide became available. Sadly, I didn’t have a chance to personally show him a copy. I suspect he never saw it.

 

I put together a comprehensive submission for the photo editor at Bradt and she told me they really liked the images. They later bought this image of an elderly Bunun Aboriginal woman smoking a pipe for the cover of their catalog. They ‘photoshopped’ Steven Crook’s book into her hand.

 

This photograph was part of a submission for Steven Crook’s Taiwanese Opera article. They used 11 photos for that article (two full page), another three for an article on the Fairy Pitta (one full page) and the cover. As a freelancer I am usually paid per photo used and I never know how many will be used; that was a good one!

 

I was a staff photographer for Xpat Magazine’s short life. It was a great magazine, but there wasn’t really a market for an English language magazine in Tainan. After editor Matt Gibson left Tainan, the magazine just couldn’t survive.

 

I was a regular photographer for FYI South Magazine in its heyday. I had at least 12 cover photos for them. This one was taken on my honeymoon trip with my wife. We slept in the back of our little blue truck. Woke up to a beautiful ‘cloud sea’ in the morning.

 

Another cover for FYI South. A variant of this (Editor Steven Crook in a Santa outfit) was used across the board in all three Compass magazines; Taipei, Taichung and Tainan.

 

Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival has always been a good seller. This is the first (and only) cover I have had for the festival. It isn’t really illustrative of the festival, but cover photos are often chosen for their ability to hold text.

 

Steven Crook’s first book gets a new lease on life as an eBook. Cover photograph is Tainan’s Sacrificial Rites Martial (War God) temple.

 

This photograph of two Taiwanese Bunun Aboriginal women holding hands was taken at the Malatangia Festival at the Maya Elementary School (which is now buried) in Namasia.

Cover of Taiwan Travel App from Gecko — again authored by the prolific and highly respected Taiwan writer Steven Crook. (Both kindle edition and  iOS iPhone edition). This was difficult to provide because it had to look good very small. It is usually displayed 50px by 50px and intricate details are lost at this size.

 

The smoking Bunun lady on another cover, the cover of China Post Newspaper’s Travel Section.

 

Something a little different — a map cover. The flower on the left was near the peak of Yushan and the rover valley on the right is Shuang Lian Chu in Namasia. The suspension bridge barely survived Typhoon Morakot. I keep meaning to do a before/after series with this view.

 

This was my very first cover photograph, 2002. It was a composite that I made to accompany the article (back when I had time to work on composites on the computer) for this long-gone magazine. It probably took me many hours to put all the elements together on a very slow computer.

Here are a few more cover shots that I can no longer find:

South Magazine

Taiwan Fun

Compass