“ Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy

A silhouette says a lot with very little information and so, there are three elements that become extremely critical for getting the right result – composition, composition and composition. Get these three elements right and even an ordinary image gets magically transformed.

A centrally placed sun, in the above frame, wouldn’t have worked in my opinion. There is beauty in asymmetry is the school of thought that I come from. I was hoping, when I sat down facing the setting sun that evening at Bharatpur was for the flock of Pelicans that were roosting right ahead of us to take flight and give us something interesting to play with. Very quickly, though, I realised that the Pelicans were done for the day and weren’t going anywhere.

Thankfully, we had the Painted Stork come to the rescue. And as they were flying from the area behind us towards the setting sun, I was tracking each of them to estimate which one would give me the exact image that I had in my mind. As luck would have it, one of them obliged.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. – Dorothea Lange