By Bobby Yip

A ten-day media tour to North Korea is a challenge for the authorities, as well as a challenge for the press. As one side tries to highly control what should be seen and who should be interviewed, the other side tries to show the world what the reality is.

Except visits to scheduled events, in most cases photographers are not allowed to walk on the street to take photos. Many of my images were shot through the window of a media bus or on one occasion through the window of a train. Watching the street scenes and the village scenes along the way, I felt an isolation between the people and me. I also sensed the isolation between the people themselves. It is the ideology behind the surface which distinguishes North Korea from many other countries, and it shows on the streets.

Events arranged for the media to cover are colorful.

By Bobby Yip

Those who have visited Hong Kong know how packed the buildings are, how busy the traffic is and how quickly people walk. When there was a global photo project on the world’s population reaching 7 billion, the first image that came to my mind was Mong Kok – one of the most crowded places in the world. The Guinness World Records lists Mong Kok as having a population density of 130,000 per square km or 340,000 per square mile.

Unlike the two high class shopping districts for tourists, Causeway Bay on the island side and Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon Peninsula, complete with world famous fashion brands, Mong Kok has a more authentic feel of the territory. Here you will find older residential buildings, smaller stores of all kinds with tags displaying cheaper prices. It’s packed with people on the pavements, crossing the streets and even sitting on the ground.

I tried to illustrate my feelings by showing many of those walking past, isolated; seeing what happened within a split second of this isolation.

When a flying machine is made in the shape of a flying horse, a dragon head or a television set, I wonder if anyone expects that it will really fly.

That was the case at a birdman competition held this week at a downtown lake in Jiangmen, a city in China’s southern Guangdong province.

Dozens of contestants only took a few seconds to nosedive straight into the water, right after taking off in these “flying machines”. Some of the inventions, mainly made of foam and fiber, fell apart before hitting the lake. Others flew further with broken wings. Out of 34 contestants, a couple managed to fly as far as 50 meters.

I tried to symbolize dreams of flying in an image showing a contestant on a flying horse, with another birdman in the background, waiting his turn. “I am scared,” the one sitting on the horse said to me. “I try not to think about how I’m going to fail. I just want to take the chance to fly my way.”

Cantonese opera, one of the major categories of Chinese opera, targets tens of millions of people speaking the regional dialect, mostly based in the southern Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, including the cities of Hong Kong and Macau.The United Nations recently proclaimed Cantonese opera, which involves singing, acting and sometimes martial arts, as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Among all such opera groups in the territory, the Hong Kong Young Talent Cantonese Opera Troupe is made up of the youngest professional artists in town, many of them in their 20s. In this opera, a 16-year-old girl, who has studied Cantonese opera for ten years, is cast in the main role of a man, normally performed by older actors.With younger faces on stage, the troupe hopes to attract a new generation of audiences to this centuries old art form.