The photo shoot for QingMing Festival (that is, the Chinese grave sweeping festival) did not quite go as well as planned. The only word I can think of is letdown…or maybe that is two words (then it is double the let down, you know). I was so excited about QingMing with my wife’s family, and they were more than happy with someone to help them take photos. It worked out well in theory.
I knew I had expectations of what it would be and I also knew that some of those expectations were likely to be wrong. It is not like Chinese culture is going to look exactly the same in every country and every family around the globe. There are only a couple billion of them or something.
In China, the QingMing I witnessed was an all-day endurance test of incense, fire crackers, food, sun, cutting grass (on the graves), and sweat. This was more like a brief family meet up. The graves were already fairly well kept, cutting out hours of “grave sweeping”. And there was only one grave involved. In China, we went from grave to grave to grave, visiting all the ancestors they could remember.
Basically, from a photographic point of view, it was so brief, there was not much I could have done. I caught a few shots (and yes, I will show some once get the CDs made and off to the family), but not much. I kept waiting for something more to happen, but it did not.
The positive side is that post-processing took no time at all.
