Rice is LIfe
Yunnan Province, China.
Golden rice terraces, yellow canola fields and freshly plowed red earth cover steep mountains and deep valleys in China’s Yunnan Province. It is a beautiful area and is inhabited by tribal minorities who still wear their traditional costume.
This harvest scene is reminiscent of Breughal’s painting called “Harvesting”. There is a woman in red lifting her heavy hair from her hot neck, near her a man rests and smokes a traditional pipe. White cloths are laid out for the noon meal and the men in the foreground gather shocks of rice to thresh in the wooden threshing box. The serpentine curves of the cut rice bundles might seem as if an artist has sketched them, but these are the curves of the rice terrace edges as made by hardworking hands hundreds of years ago.
I tried to give this photo a painterly look. It was all done in Photoshop as I had no special software at the time. I can’t tell you what I did. I just kept trying different filters until this happened and I decided that it was perfect.
It’s hard to give a ‘recipe’ for Photoshop because what works on one photo will not produce the same results on another. I have tons of expensive books that I hoped would provide a magic recipe but they didn’t. You can get some ideas from books and you can practice on their photos (in some books) but there is no guarantee the technique will work on your photo.