✿ Cecy Young's Asia Adventures ✿

With her incredible eye for detail and unique approach to composition and colour, Cecy Young takes the sort of photographs we all dream of having in our personal photo albums (but will instead add to our Pinterest moodboards). Straight after shooting our Summer '15 lookbook, Cecy swapped life in Paris for a 45 day trip across Asia photographing the candy coloured settings of some of the continents most exciting cities including Seoul, Tokyo and Onomichi. Featuring fuzzy cats, Harajuku girls and cherry blossom, today we're showcasing some of Cecy's favourite photographs from her Asia Adventures while she fills us in on her top trip tips and the art of finding beauty in ordinary things. Introduce yourself...

I'm a photographer from Mexico, I have lived in Paris from the last 4 years and I am mostly into fashion and travel.

Sum up your trip to Asia. 

I wanted to do a trip with my younger sister for some time. We both had free time around April so we started fantasising about the idea until we finally said YOLO and started booking. We went to Japan last year but mostly to tourist places, so this time we wanted to discover other hidden gems.

We met in Hong Kong then flew from there to Seoul in South Korea, and then from there we did all the traveling by land and sea. In total we traveled for around 45 days.

To plan the trip, I grabbed a map and started looking for places that could be interesting (like cities with a bayside or little islands) and then I would Google the names. I saw that from South Korea we could cross by ferry from Busan to Fukuoka in Japan, so we did that…. we were almost the only tourists in the ferry. We started from the south of Japan, Kyushu, and eventually made it to Tokyo by train. We stopped in some cities and islands, and spent two weeks doing that until we reached Tokyo.

It was amazing, we had everything kind of planned but a lot of places we visited were totally spontaneous.

What was the best place you visited? 

I liked all the places we went to, but Onomichi in the Hiroshima prefecture deserves a special mention. There are almost no tourists there. It's a very beautiful, traditional bay city and was covered in Sakura. It also has good access to islands in the Seto Inland Sea; there is a very modern, well maintained route called 'Shimanami Kaido' that connects Onomichi and Imabari, and you can cycle through this road and visit small islands and their towns. I fell in love with this area.

What was the best thing you photographed on your trip? 

The colourful buildings in Hong Kong, people interacting with their cities, lots and lots of Sakura and some very cute japanese bloggers!

From a photographers perspective, what do you think are the key differences between shooting in Asia and Europe? 

Asia in general is full of surprises, even going to a supermarket there is so different for me. It's also very different in terms of colours, Asia can be very colourful.

You have a really unique eye, what inspires your work? 

Thanks! It's hard to describe, but mainly colours and textures, light, women, stories and finding beauty in ordinary things.

How did you get into photography?

In college I wanted to be a painter but was kind of bad at it and unskilled. I then tried photography and immediately felt right.

Where's next on your wish list to visit? 

So many places! Myanmar, Vietnam, Iceland… Japan again!

See more of Cecy Young's photography over at cecyyoung.com and get a daily dose of her work at instagram.com/cecyyoung.