Happy moments captured free of charge

A volunteer team of photographers in Chonggyai county, Tibet autonomous region, make family portraits for remote Tibetan villagers, and all services are free of charge.

The volunteers focus on the lives of the rural villagers in the county.

Over the past two weeks, the team traveled to five villages and communities in the county's Chonggyai township, where they photographed 236 families.

Established in 2019, the family portrait photo studio has been conducting many voluntary photography activities for the county's rural villagers. The photographs help people remember happy moments of their lives.

Dressed in their newest and best, all members of a family will wait excitedly in a community yard. For many, it's their first family portrait.

Padron, a resident of the Sholpa residential community of Chonggyai township, said he was impressed.

"They are professional, and it is free, so we feel that we are very close to the culture," Padron said.

Samtan, one of the people responsible for the studio, said his team has taken more than 300 family portraits of villagers, and he was glad to find that many of them had never done it before.

"We want to record not only their life images but also convey the social and economic changes of the county," he said.

"We have elicited many smiles while shooting the portraits, and we want to make more residents feel the warmth of the government."