- Diagonal Lines
I’ve got hundreds of photos of the leg-rowing fishermen at Inle Lake. That’s what happens when you take a photo tour. You may come home with 80 gigabytes of photos, but many are the same photo. Well, more or less. The fishermen were action shots so although the subject is the same, each shot is slightly different. It can take time to find the one good one in the bunch. Sometimes I make the thumbnails quite small (in Bridge) and then can get more of an idea of whether the composition is good or not just with a glance. You find out if the photo is sharp, expressions are good, etc. once you enlarge it.
So many faults in composition can be remedied now in Photoshop, CS6 …easily remedied, I should say. You can move a person from one side of the photo to another with just a few clicks with the new content aware move tool. I didn’t need to move anyone in the photo above. But I did saturate it and crop it.
At first I didn’t like the side of our boat protruding into the shot, but after saturation, I liked the echo of the rich orange/gold color and the opposing diagonal line. I like the fishermen’s bodies leaning to form a ‘V’ shape. Geometry is good, remember.
We shot these photos from our boat. Our guide had arranged to meet these men at a certain time and place. Then he called directions to them in Burmese and we did our best to photograph. The boat was a long boat, maybe 30 feet long, and the coveted spot near the guide (he lined them up to suit his shots most of the time) was far away from my vantage point. I never did get a shot with the fishermen directly in line with the sun’s path on the water. That sticks in my craw as we southerners used to say.