There's a split second when a cast fishing net hangs suspended in the air, mid-arc, before it settles on the water.
Singaporean photographer Chin Leong Teo caught that moment in Dawn Net, and the result looks less like a fishing photograph and more like liquid gold spilling across dark water.
This stunning composition helped earn Teo second place in the Photographer of the Year category at the International Aerial Photographer of the Year 2026 awards, as part of a tetralogy of portfolio images selected from 1,587 entries worldwide.
How the moment was captured
Teo shot the image on a Hasselblad L2D-20c, the camera built into DJI's Mavic 3 series drones.
He used a fast 1/640 second shutter speed to freeze the net mid-flight, at f/2.8 and ISO100 for clean, sharp detail. He also dialled in -1 exposure compensation, deliberately underexposing the shot to protect the bright yellow net from blowing out against the water's reflections.
That combination of settings matters more than it might first appear.
Drone cameras have small sensors compared to full-frame cameras, which makes them less forgiving of blown highlights – especially against reflective water at low sun angles.
By shooting at a low ISO and underexposing slightly, Teo gave himself more room to recover shadow detail in post-processing without sacrificing the net's vivid color.
The fast shutter speed was equally deliberate: any slower and the net's fine mesh would have blurred into a shapeless smear rather than the crisp, sweeping curves that define the image. It's the kind of exposure discipline that separates a lucky snapshot from a planned composition.
Teo's image was captured off the coast of Vietnam, with the drone hovering at around 305ft / 93m. That height was the perfect sweet spot: close enough to capture the fisherman's technique clearly, but high enough to turn the net's sweeping lines into pure pattern and shape.
Why it works
Teo works across travel, nature and landscape photography, and has lived in Singapore, the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia and Japan. That globetrotting background shows in his eye for finding something worth stopping for, wherever he finds it.
Good timing also lies at the heart of this photo. A second earlier, the net would still be bunched in the fisherman's hands. A second later, it would already be sinking into the water.
Instead, Teo caught it at full stretch, curving away from the boat toward two pale patches in the water that echo the net's own shape.
Ultimately, Dawn Net is aerial photography at its finest. Nothing about the subject in itself is unusual: a fisherman casting a net is one of the oldest, most ordinary sights on the water.
What makes the image extraordinary is the timing, his exposure control and his willingness to fly above a scene most photographers would only shoot from the shore. Seen from directly overhead, an everyday act of work becomes something closer to a painting.
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