Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • A ray fish ashore in a beach settlement in Saint Louis, Senegal.<br />
<br />
Stingrays are considered a type of fish that is related to sharks. They are found in the warm and temperate waters all over the world. Stingrays have a flat, gray to the darkish brown body and a long tail with a poisonous stinger on their end. Stingray is a popular seafood dish in many parts of the world.
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  • A father and son head to an early morning parade for a Carnival type festival celebrated every five years in spring when light wins over darkness in the mountains. Ancient Pagan traditions and festivals such as Schleicherlaufen  are held in the Tyrol where the Savages wear grotesque masks and costumes of moss, representing winter. Men go into the woods nearby Telfs and collect lichen while wives and mothers sew it onto clothing creating "wild ones" for the festival.
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  • Photographer Randy Olson takes images inside the Ocean Park Aquarium in Hong Kong.
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  • Yvonne’s boutique spas in Shanghai offer 13 types of facials, plus a chocolate pedicure for $48. Her father escaped China in 1949 with his family and two of his siblings died in the crossing (there were ten children, his father had multiple wives). Yvonne’s family is typical of the Chinese who were smart enough to get out when it was bad and smart enough to get back in when things were improving. Diva Life is set up for two types of clients; the ex-pat tai tai wives of diplomats and the wannabe Chinese who follow that crowd into Yvonne’s spa. Yvonne has the Diva life. She designs her own furniture, spa, and clothes. She spends the morning at the fabric market and meeting with her tailor, and then goes to her office. But the main reason she started the spa is so that she can have a couple hours of spa treatment any day she likes.
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  • Tourists dive on Easter Island's reef encounter a moai that was made for a 1994 Hollywood movie and then sunk offshore. The reef is healthy, although it is overfished. <br />
Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island in the world, 2300 miles from Chile and the nearest Polynesian center the opposite direction is Tahiti, 2600 miles to the west.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park. Seventy couples participated in a mass marriage event that started at a shopping mall and ended up in Century Park for the ceremony.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
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  • Final touches to makeup before a Chinese cultural program show.
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  • A worker in a steel mill in Huaxi village.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • This mass wedding took place at the Great Wall outside Beijing. After reading many surveys about how money was more important than love, I watched and photographed this woman all day. She never smiled.  Marriage can be a great social and financial leap forward.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A construction site near Raffles City.
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  • Couples at the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Brides line up for the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Brides numbered 32 through 43 line up in their queue at the Rose Wedding Festival. Seventy couples in this mass marriage ceremony started at a shopping mall, then traveled to Century Park for the ceremony. The marriage-age consumer is a prime target for first-world companies. The middle class’s under-30-consumer market alone will be the size of the entire EU market in the next decade.
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  • Marriage is different in China, from mass weddings like this, to the “bare branches” phenomenon where there are not enough women for all the men to marry. Couples aspire to the ideal of the billboard above them—the one-child family. But will their son be able to find a girl? According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls, which is 0.53 points lower than the ratio obtained from a population sample survey carried out in 2005. However, the gender ratio of 118.06 is still beyond the normal range of around 105 percent, and experts warn of increased social instability should this trend continue. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. So maybe everyone eventually has a car, but can every boy have a girl? It is important for China’s leaders to placate the Comfort Class. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital’s sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million, or about a million more vehicles than in all of New York City.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
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  • Adjusting a bride's veil for marriage at the Rose Wedding Festival.
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  • Some of the 70 couples in the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Some of the 70 couples in the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Some of the 70 couples in the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Adjusting the uniforms of guards at the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • A resident exits a villa in the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • A guard stands outside a villa in the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • A midwife cleans up a newborn baby girl at a rural clinic.
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  • The hands of a midwife and a newborn baby girl at a rural clinic.
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  • At the Mission Hills Golf Club, the largest in the world.
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  • At the check-out of the first Sam's Club store in China.
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  • A wedding photo on a bridge with the Pudong skyline in the background.
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  • A young woman shops for shoes.
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  • A bellhop at a boutique hotel.
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  • Flower girls and ring boys and a ringbearer at a wedding.
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  • Flower girls at a wedding.
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  • A dragon dance for promotional purposes on East Nanjing Road.
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  • Weary Chinese middle class groom to be on wedding shopping street in Guangzhou, China
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  • Men sitting outside a shop on a street known for wedding attire. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • A woman in an office near a poster of the Statue of Liberty.
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  • A young woman on the phone and a guard at the steel mill in Huaxi.
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  • Models on a cattle call fixing their make up.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A fashion designer's workshop.
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  • A young woman shops for shoes.
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  • A young woman on the phone and a guard at the steel mill in Huaxi.
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  • This is a meeting of the “farmer” capitalist millionaires in Huaxi Village (Farmers Village), a model farm for the last 45 years. Even though they are the collective ideal of the capitalist model, they still dress in Mao-ish style outfits and make decisions for the 80 businesses in a socialist forum.<br />
<br />
These “model farmers” were capitalists before it was allowed in China. They started factories, but worked in them secretly (no windows). When government officials came around, all the workers ran out into the fields and pretended to be peasants. They became the first and most successful capitalist exploitation of the collective. Huaxi Village eventually went bankrupt.
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  • A young fashion designer in her studio and shop.
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  • There are 2.6 billion armpits in China, according to an ad man, and someone has to sell them deodorant. This shop-owner (right) thinks a guy wandering Nanjing Road in a full knight suit will do the trick for his snack shop.
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  • A young woman in costume during the October Week holiday.
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  • Bridesmaids prepare for a wedding.
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  • A bride prepares for her wedding.
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  • A fish tank separates patrons from the kitchen at a restaurant on East Nanjing Road | Shanghai, China
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  • Staff and customers at a Thai restaurant in an upscale shopping mall.
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  • Singers and actresses get ready for an opera performance at a hotel.
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  • A giant aquarium at the spa of the Shanghai Orient Rome Holiday Hotel.
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  • Dancing in Mingzhu Park during the October holiday.
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  • Russian Dancers in Mingzhu Park during the October holiday.
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  • A bride at the shopping mall.
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  • A groom signs a wall with a kiss at the Rose Wedding Festival.
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  • A bride puts lipstick on her groom at the Rose Wedding Festival.
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  • Some of the 70 couples in the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • A teenage schoolgirl sits in a car reading a comic book.
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  • A teenage schoolgirl sits in a car.
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  • A teenage schoolgirl adjusts her uniform.
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  • Shoppers in pajamas in the 200 block of Guangdong road near the Bund.
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  • Shoppers in pajamas in the 200 block of Guangdong road near the Bund.
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  • Crocodile and other meat at the butchery department of Sam's Club.
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  • At the check-out of a Sam's Club store in China.
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  • All over China, young architects design buildings that are just experiments: throw in a bit of classical modern, a little Prairie style, a few Roman columns. This restaurant with the longest name I saw in China, decided one day they would just photograph the interior of the restaurant with all the customers and then have it printed on huge canvas sheets so it feels like you are sitting inside the restaurant – inside the restaurant.
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  • A woman tries on her wedding dress at a dressmaker's shop.
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  • A woman tries on her wedding dress as her Australian fiancee looks on.
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  • Kids posing with people in Cultural Revolution costumes at a car show.
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  • A male figure entices people into a Beijing chain restaurant.
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  • Clinic director readies to examine a child burned by scalding water.
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  • Schoolgirls at a ceremony celebrating the opening of a new clinic.
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  • Schoolgirls at a ceremony celebrating the opening of a new clinic.
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  • Two midwives help a woman give birth at the Dan Moser Memorial Clinic.
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  • A cocktail party celebration at an Evian spa.
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  • Newborn baby and nurse attendant.
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  • An Afro-Cuban dance teacher shows dance moves of sea goddess Yemaya.
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  • An Afro-Cuban dance teacher looks out toward the ocean.
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  • An Afro-Cuban dance teacher shows dance moves of sea goddess Yemaya.
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  • Dressed in elegant formal wear, a bride and groom walk to the helicopter to fly up onto a glacier for their wedding ceremony in Southeast Alaska.
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  • A bride and groom cut the cake and kiss after their wedding ceremony that was held on the Mendenhall Glacier. Champagne, flowers, music and a linen table cloth set the scene for their atypical, romantic celebration.
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  • Nurse and doctor holding a just born baby.
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  • A spa employee at the Mission Hills Golf Club.
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  • A model and a person in Cultural Revolution costumes at a car show.
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  • A guard at an upscale gated housing development.
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  • Australian Aborigine man with body paint on legs watched by two women.
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  • An Aborigine and white man lighting up cigarettes together.
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  • Three men contemplate the best way to cross a flooded dirt road.
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  • The Fortune Land International Hotel has embraced the boutique hotel concept of the U.S., but on steroids. Giant mushrooms hang from the lobby ceiling above strange-looking and not always comfortable chair-pods.
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  • Christian metal rocker Nat Handloser shows off his finger armor.
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  • Rubber crocodiles hold restroom keys at an Australian rest stop.
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  • A worker in a hairnet and protective jacket is reflected in a Senevisa shrimp processing factory.<br />
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The plant in Dakar processes 4.5 tons of shrimp a day brought in from artisanal fishermen. The local market consumes only three percent of the production of this plant.
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  • Hunters provide monkey meat to the town and surrounding community.<br />
<br />
Estimates are that between 30 and 85% of daily protein intake of Africans comes from bushmeat. <br />
<br />
Population growth and the commercialization of the trade in bushmeat creates hunting pressure upon wild animal populations. Wildlife numbers are rapidly declining, and there are concerns that animal diseases may be transmitted to humans.
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  • After the wedding ceremony on the Mendenhall Glacier, a newly married couple waits to fly back to their cruise ship by helicopter.
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  • A newly married couple dances on Mendenhall Glacier. They took a helicopter onto the icefield and celebrated after the ceremony. Although dressed in traditional wedding formal wear, they were careful to step over the melting ice in their crampons.
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  • Tourists are drawn to the beauty of Alaska and its glaciers, and some come for the ultimate and most unlikely experience—donning crampons for their wedding on ice.<br />
If the weather cooperates, couples can arrange for a limousine pickup from a cruise ship to the airport for a helicopter flight onto a glacier. They had a traditional ceremony with tuxedo and white wedding dress and extra touches including wedding cake, music, and flowers.<br />
The groom pops the cork on a bottle of champagne provided by the planner who married this couple on the Mendenhall Glacier.
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