Photo of the month (July 2026 Edition): Misty China
As mentioned in the previous post here on the blog, at the end of June and beginning of July I traveled from Scotland, where I’ll be staying until September, to China to attend a conference on tropical biology and conservation. It was the same conference that took me to Mexico last year, and, much like my trip to New Zealand, it gave me yet another wonderful opportunity to discover a new part of the world thanks to my work as a scientist.
Even though that part was largely limited to the area around the conference venue, with hardly any time to truly experience the country I had flown so many hours to reach, these trips are still opportunities to broaden horizons little by little and return home with a much richer cultural baggage. Not being able to spend months traveling through these countries is like photographing a landscape with a telephoto lens instead of a wide-angle lens. A telephoto lens, however, reveals details that would go completely unnoticed in a photograph with a broader field of view. The same is true of a short trip focused on immersing yourself in a single place.
This month’s Photo of the Month is, therefore, an image that captures my few days in a country with more than four thousand years of history, where everything is on a grand scale and always surrounded by people. June and July are among the rainiest months across much of China, especially in the region I visited. But the rain does nothing to diminish the country’s charm. The muted atmosphere lends every scene an air of mystery, leaving me with the feeling that even another four thousand years would not be enough to discover everything this vast part of the world has to offer.