- The Rice Harvest
Yunnan Province, China. It was autumn and the people were in the rice terraces, cutting, drying, threshing and hauling the rice harvest to the villages.
There were as many women in the field as there were men or maybe more. Some had their toddlers with them. In this photo, the women are cutting the rice and laying it in neat piles to dry.
The men did the threshing which entailed beating shocks of rice stalks against a wooden trough. The grains of rice fell into the trough and were gathered into sacks or baskets.
These were some of China’s minorities, tribes such as the Hani and a variety of the Miao. Many of the men wore western clothes but the women wore their embroidered costumes or black pajamas with colorful head scarves.
I loved the baskets the villagers used. They had a basket for every purpose. There were large round ones, bigger than our laundry baskets, used to hold live poultry, they made egg cartons out of straw, backpack baskets for carrying loads. large flat trays for I don’t know what, but I wanted one of each.
I did a lot to this photo to get this “rice paper” look. It doesn’t really look like rice paper, but that is what I call it. I used Lucis Art, but you could just as easily use Topaz Adjust 5 and get the same effect. I remember that I used the plug in several times to get a built up look. I think it gives a three dimensional look.