Cosmos capturer shares story
Award-winning photographer Ye Ziyi travels to some of the planet’s remotest areas to capture stunning images of the cosmos. Xing Wen reports.
“Look at the stars. See how they shine for you,” Coldplay once sang, describing the ease with which most casual stargazers can enjoy the night sky. However, for Ye Ziyi, a 28-year-old Beijing native, it is an altogether more involved process, as she shoulders her heavy photographic equipment and travels around the world to capture beautiful images of the sparkling firmament.
It is worth it, however, because in 2016, she won the Beauty of the Night Sky category of the International Earth & Sky Photo Contest (TWAN).
Ye says she took part in the competition not just for herself, but for the other photography enthusiasts in China who devote themselves to the medium.
“There are a lot of outstanding photographers in China,” she said, “but the language barriers and insufficient opportunities make it harder for them to be seen or heard by the outside world.
“These awards allow me to meet more foreign photographers and learn from them, as well as acquaint foreign media and audiences with the work that Chinese photographers are producing.”
About a year after scooping the award, her photo, Luminous Salar de Uyuni, was selected by NASA as its Astronomy Picture of the Day on April 15 last year.
The picture depicts bright stars in the constellation of Orion the Hunter, and Aldebaran, eye of Taurus the Bull, hanging in the night sky over Bolivia. Below, the faintly luminous edges of patterns in the mineral-crusted mud of the Uyuni Salt Flat in southwest Bolivia can be traced to the horizon.
“Anyway, my efforts received the recognition they deserved and I am so happy about that. A dream of mine came true,” proclaims Ye.
Her love of the stars, aurorae and solar eclipses all began at her high school astronomy club.
When she was 15 years old, her geography teacher gave her the opportunity to view the night sky, studded with billions of bright stars, using an astronomical telescope.
She was understandably awestruck by the boundlessness of it all.
“It was incredibly wonderful,” she recalls, “and as time went by, I got to know stars better.
“My curiosity about the sky and stars has spurred me to travel huge distances, with or without companions.”
Since 2009, in order to shoot a total solar eclipse, she made five separate trips to Shanghai, Kenya, the Arctic Ocean, Indonesia and the United States.
A total solar eclipse can last for several hours, while totality can range from just a few seconds to 7.5 minutes. Recording a total solar eclipse requires not only the photographer’s patience but also a bit of luck.
“The first two trips were fruitless because of unfavorable weather conditions on the day of the eclipse,” Ye said.
It took packing nearly her own body weight in equipment, several ferries, trains and planes and a five-hour wait in freezing weather on the snow-covered Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in March 2015 before she successfully witnessed a total solar eclipse.
“What I’ve imagined about the eclipse could not rival what I saw with my own eyes,” Ye said. “I want to show people the beauty and power of the nature through my photos.”
This philosophy would explain why she resigned from her job at a Singapore-based advertising agency to become a full-time “starchaser.”
Since substituting the rat-race for the space chase, Ye has spent half of her time on the road, camping on uninhabited mountains and in remote valleys, waiting for the perfect moment to open the lens.
As her stature in night-sky photography circles has grown, so has the weight of her fridge door. She has developed a habit of buying a local fridge magnet every time she arrives in a new place and, now, dozens of them — some in the shape of African sculptures and others that are simply the name of their origin — litter the front of the appliance in her living room, which has become an evolving atlas of her celestial pursuit as she crisscrosses the globe.
“Chasing stars sounds romantic, but it’s really not,” she admits. “You will have probably slept in a field full of cow dung, and been subject of the various creatures’ curiosity in the meantime.”
Sometimes, Ye can be so focused on capturing a suitably dazzling tableau of stars, that she becomes oblivious to all else, including surrounding peril and her own health.
During a trip to Namtso, a lake in Tibet, she felt pain in her chest and could hardly breathe. A local first-aid station diagnosed her with early emphysema and warned her of the disastrous consequences if she was not treated in time. Despite such episodes, however, Ye does not consider her work to be dangerous.
“The media sometimes exaggerates the dangers, especially after they learn that I am a female photographer in my 20s,” she says.
“Maybe what I am doing is dangerous. What I am doing is just a little bit out of the ordinary,” she observes, “but I don’t want to be labeled by my gender or age.”
Explaining the reason behind her adventurous choices, she recalls an incident that took place at Yellowstone National Park in the US last year.
While Ye and her colleagues were on a shoot, unloading equipment and getting everything set up, a deer appeared, stared at them for a moment and then disappeared just like it was never there to begin with.
“At that moment it looked at us like human beings, and when I went to look, it had already gone,” she remembers. “Then the idea occurred to me that, except for self-expression, photography is also an important way to record a fleeting moment.
“I would like to spare no effort in recording the fleeting beauty of the sky.”