A face in the fog
Whether he’s at home or on holiday next to the Chobe River in Botswana, Roy Moore from Grabouw always makes sure he rises with the larks.
“We stayed at the Thebe River Lodge in Kasane, and I took this photo early one morning while the fog was still hanging over the Chobe. The water looks like a giant steam bath and even though it looks quiet you could hear the hippos in the distance. The dark water and fog give my soul peace and quiet; it makes me happy and also gives me inner gratitude.”
No one can describe the photo better than Roy does. You experience everything exactly as he describes it and you can even hear the hippos. In the olden days, the days of film, this kind of photo wouldn’t have been possible, especially for amateurs. You wouldn’t have carried a roll of 1 000 ISO film with you to take a photo like this. The higher the ISO, the more light-sensitive it is – you can therefore take photos in low light. Since digital cameras became dominant, ISO has benefitted the most. A film photograph with a 1 000 ISO film shows a lot of grain (the tiny dots on the photo), while in the digital era it almost disappears. Today’s cellphone cameras are excellent in terms of light and gives you an opportunity to snap basically anything you can see. Look at the photo’s composition – it can’t really be any better because all the elements are neatly balanced. But scale helps when you take a photo of something big (like the boat on the water). If it wasn’t for the chairs you wouldn’t have been able to guess the size of the boat. A human figure is preferable, but if Roy still had to wait for someone the calm would have been disturbed.