The Water Biker, the story behind the photograph

As we get older we tend to have moments when we can sit quietly on a porch somewhere enjoying a long drink and remembering "great moments" gone by. Well here is one where we were doing just that at a lakeside property on a huge inland hydroelectric lake in Brazil called Furnas, nicknamed "The Minas Sea", since it is over 350 kilometers long, and has many tributaries feeding it fresh water constantly. The silence of the calm lake was awoken with a grinding sound of metal and gravel. To our amazement there was this ingenious boy with an old bike with no tyres and no nuts holding the wheel to the front fork. He was "riding" along in the shallow but firm part of the shore, so I grabbed my Canon 5D camera with a 24-105mm L series lens and ran down to the beach to capture this poetic moment. The lighting was end-of-day, almost dusk, and so I treated the image to higher contrast and a silhouette to give it more impact. The delicate balance between the highlights and shadows can easily be tweaked with the tools available today. This is all part of the initial presentation of my "Photo Coaching" PC workshops that are available, both online and personally.