The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

FIGURE IN A LANDSCAPE

These are the biggest falls on the Mekong River, in Laos, and this is an attempt to give scale. Seen alone as a landscape image, they don’t impress as much as the real thing because they lack comparison—the trees could be almost any size. What shows their size is the tiny figure of a fisherman, doing his dangerous daily work with a net, in the lower right. He was worth a close shot on his own, but the needs of the bigger view won, and I framed a panorama like this—classic “figure in a landscape,” a type of image that dates back to at least the sixteenth century. Even so, there was the question of whether horizontal or vertical, and how small the figure could be in the image and still be seen. Too small and the point would ...