San Francisco-based photographer and longtime Google employee Omid Scheybani recently went on a 10-day trip through North Korea.
He carried only his iPhone to snap the pics, explaining in an interview with photo-sharing app EyeEm, "It was easy to quickly pull up the cam and take shots."
The notoriously secretive North Korean government has strict guidelines regarding what can and can't be photographed in the country. Even professional Getty photographers use only their phones to capture images of the rarely seen culture.
While there were rules that limited what he could capture, Scheybani worked within the restrictions to capture some beautiful moments.
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Scheybani and a few friends traveled with the Vancouver-based organization Choui Consulting. "We spent time in Pyongyang as well as other places throughout the DPRK," he told EyeEm.
Source: EyeEm
"I was warned to not take pictures of the Army personnel, the poverty we saw outside of Pyongyang, or portray any of the leaders in any negative way (their full body had to be on the pics, wasn't allow to cut/crop anything)," he told EyeEm.
Scheybani described Pyongyang as an "exclusive" city in a post on Medium. "The government decides who gets to live there and it makes sure the most loyal citizens do — it truly is a privilege and even visiting the city from outside requires permits," he wrote.
Source: Medium
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