Taipei, Taiwan, October 2025
Most of what I shot in Taipei swung back and forth: dense neon streets one evening, an empty volcanic hillside the next morning, then straight back up into the clouds from the 89th floor of the tallest building in the city.
Ximending, the entertainment district, is where I'd send anyone who wants to understand Taipei after dark. Stand at the main junction around eight or nine in the evening and the whole city feels turned up past its normal volume: animated billboards covering entire building facades, neon stacked five and six deep on every block, a four-storey anime billboard glowing over a curved white building with an H&M sign at street level. I shot it in the blue hour, just after the sky loses its light but before it loses its colour, because that residual deep blue overhead does more for the frame than a flat black sky ever could.
Raohe Street Night Market, a short ride away in Songshan, is a different kind of chaos. Its entrance gate is a traditional temple-style arch strung with hundreds of bulbs, and I shot it from across the road to get the full width of it in frame; a red traffic light drifted into the corner of the shot by accident and I kept it. Inside, the light turns warm and amber, stallholders work at charcoal ovens that glow from twenty metres off, and by nine on a weeknight it's shoulder to shoulder the entire six hundred metres. I stopped fighting the crowd early on and started shooting through it instead of around it.
From street level, Taipei feels human-sized and busy. From the 89th-floor observatory of Taipei 101 it looks almost impossibly vast. I went up on a clear October morning with cloud building over the mountains to the north, which gave the skyline some weather to push against instead of a flat blue nothing. Looking northwest, the Tamsui River threads through the basin as a thin silver line, and directly below, the Agora Garden tower reveals a spiralling double-helix of planted terraces that's completely invisible from the ground.
The city isn't the whole story, though. Forty minutes out by bus, Yangmingshan National Park holds Xiaoyoukeng, a volcanic fumarole field that smells of sulphur before you even see it. The rock there is stained deep rust-red by centuries of mineral deposits, and it sits in sharp contrast against the green hillside, a colour combination I haven't found anywhere else I've shot, in Britain or the Alps. Small stained waterfalls thread through the crusted rock shelves, and morning cloud moving over the peak above gave the whole scene some welcome depth.
And then there's the coast. An afternoon in Jiufen, climbing the upper paths as the light started to turn, opened onto the full sweep of Taiwan's northeast coastline: Keelung Island sitting on the horizon like a full stop, the bay below shifting slowly from grey-green to gold as the sun dropped. Inland, the hills rolled back towards Taipei in overlapping ridges that dissolved into bands of warm haze, no hard edges left by sunset.
Five very different places in four days. If I went back I'd want a sunrise over that same northeast coast, looking east before the haze builds. That's a shot worth setting an early alarm for.
