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Morning splash

Every morning Dirk Crafford of Kleinmond makes sure he gets in his walk and he’s always ready to capture the dawn sun.

“My wife Nadia and I have been walking 6 km every morning since the start of lockdown. I saw this body of flat water on our road and asked Nadia to throw a stone into it. I had my phone ready to take a picture as the stone hit the water. You can’t, of course, predict exactly how your photo will turn out. I took just one shot.”

Even though it may sound as though Dirk got lucky with this photograph, much thinking went into it, too – Dirk says he had tried to take this kind of photo before and was therefore a little more experienced this time around.

But of course, Dirk has no guarantee of what he’d capture in that fraction of a second. This is where luck does play a role.

You can’t not look at the centre of the photo – this is where the stone hits the water. Because there is almost no detail around this point, simply uniform shades of light, it is a good example of a composition that has the centre as the focal point.

The pic’s energy lies in the splashing water. Thanks to the sun being directly behind the flying drops, interesting patterns form in the thin curtain of water.

Two further elements here make it a moment to remember. The shape of the top of the splashing water has you thinking of a hand reaching for the sun – some droplets even move past the sun to the left. That connects’ the sun – the next strong focal point – with the centre.

Next, and without realising it at first, the blank foreground covers almost half of the photo. The reflection of the background in the water only shows the bit up to the horizontal plane where the water splashes and upwards.

See how the colour differs from here on down: it looks a bit more blue and indicates that the sky above Dirk was probably open and blue – even though it’s not visible in the photo.

It does appear as if a cloud is hiding on the left.