Seaton Shoots Photography News

Two hours drive from Guilin on the banks of the Li River. I’m thinking about what drew me to this scene when I photographed it. We were in amazing Yangshuo ( or Yangsoo ) waiting for a week before the weather broke … which helped prove the point made by a travel photographer that I met on a plane to Hong Kong. “It’s the waiting that will break you”. It gets expensive. More so in Hong Kong than in Yangshuo!

From the wikipedia entry for Yangshuo it looks like this place, as with all “best kept secrets”, aint so secret anymore!! Sitting in an open air cafe for breakfast, I took this from across the street. I don’t know what she has in the wooden barrel, guessing rice, but I’ve got a better idea what the miles per gallon rating is for their vehicles!

Tiz “zzz” Myers and I rented bikes for the day and hit the road, and river. Any road. We didn’t care. We ended up seeing Moon Hill and plenty of people dealing with flooding in their daily lives. And the obligatory cormorant fisherman. Well worth the wait.

PHOTO TIP: look where the girls heads are in the frame. With auto focus it is so so easy to leave faces and heads smack in the middle, with all that space above wasted, and legs, feet etc chopped off. A composition starting point should be to keep your images “grounded”. So, focus on faces and then move them up in the frame – that is, point the lens down a little. Make this a habit, and you’ll find yourself doing it even for grab shots without realising it! In this image, I could have raised them just a little more to see more of the bike wheel in the puddle ….. and now I’m thinking about what if … what if we went vertical and saw their reflections in the water?

Do you think this would add or take away from the photograph?