Giant Buddha and Shwedagon Pagoda
Rangoon, Burma 2011
When you want to photograph something as large as the Shwedagon Pagoda or the giant Buddha, what can you do to make it interesting? You can show the crowds below, of course, or try to find a suitable foreground such as a person kneeling but then the huge structure becomes less huge. It is just part of the photo It loses the overwhelming presence and sense of majesty that you feel as you stand before it.
O.K. You shoot it and it alone. And you wind up with a boring photo that still doesn’t convey the feeling of being there. Well, I’ve got an idea and for me, it works.
How I came to my brilliant idea: I was trying to work on the Shwedagon Pagoda. I had a noontime shot of the pagoda leaning into the blue sky…no foreground, nothing else in the shot at all. It was one for the waste basket, but I hate to discard my shots especially when I don’t have a better one. I began to search for other similar shots and found this shot of a giant Buddha. Eureka! The Buddha would fill in the empty blue sky of the pagoda nicely. Then I added a gold color and some squiggles (which used to be part of Nik Filters Color Efex Pro 3) and voila, as the French might say, my photo is complete.