Pack horses cross the Shi Yi Luo bridge across the Yalong River south of 7000-metre Gonggashan, Sichuan, China. Ponies and mules are used regularly here to support small-scale mining operations in the mountains...Manfrotto.It was midday and we were driving up the spectacular gorge of the Yalong River in southwest Sichuan, China. (It was actually 12:36, one of the great things about EXIF data). The assignment was my book project for the last three years, following the 3,000+ kilometers of the Tea Horse Road, than ancient trade route that pack trains followed carrying tea from the far south of Yunnan to Tibet. The road twisted and turned as it hugged the side of the gorge, and as usual I was on the look-out for images. That’s what you do when you have a long drive between locations, as it’s often serendipity that gives you the shot on travel assignments...We came across a small footbridge as we turned one bend. Not many bridges across this river, as there were towns only every fifty kilometers or so. This is a sparsely populated area of China. A quick scan to see if anyone was crossing as we drove by, and then my eye caught some movement directly below us, and it looked like a horse. For this book, horses, ponies and mules were at a visual premium, for obvious reasons. Tea no longer moves by pack train, but there are horses in the remoter parts of the region still used for transport. This was worth stopping for. Once we had stopped, I could see that there were several ponies with loads milling around at one end of the bridge. My friend went down to find out what was going on, and called me back on the mobile. This was a pack train about to set out for a small gold mining camp in the hills across the river. They came and left every so often during the day. So, a perfect opportunity, and worth waiting until they got ready and crossed. ..The only thing that wasn’t perfect was the light, or rather the combination of light and color. Harsh sunlight, stark shadows, water a muddy brown, trees undistinguished. This is a common assignment dilemma. The shot, or a similar one, would look better in color much later in the day, when the sun was low, and there was a fair chance we could find out when a pack train would next cross. But I had a book to shoot and a lot of roads to cover. Waiting would eat half a day out of my schedule, and a shot would have to be very special indeed to be worth that. Fortunately, I already knew what I was going to do, which was to ‘shoot’ it in black and white. I would process the file for stark contrast and make a strongly graphic image out of it by using the diagonal of the bridge. Here, for me at least, was classic case of an image being completely different in black and white from in color. You can see a comparison over on the other page: Save the Shot by Throwing Out the Color. I used a Sony a900 with a 70-200mm lens set at 200mm, sensitivity at its lowest, ISO 100, and 1/100sec at ƒ11...