The finalist images from the most recent Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) Awards were particularly impressive, and I continue to revisit the website not only to admire them, but also to learn from them.
The image we’re looking at here was the runner-up in the Adventures & Experiences Portfolio category, and what I love about this scene — and the biggest takeaway for me — is how the photographer creatively combined different shapes and complementary colors.
Shot by Teo Chin Leong (Singapore) on a DJI Mavic 3 drone, the scene depicts a fisherman in Hoi An, Vietnam, casting a large net over a river from his humble canoe.
While at first this might seem like another ordinary day at work for the fisherman, look more closely, and the way a range of shapes, along with complementary colors, combine becomes clear, and you realize just how brilliant this composition is.
The huge triangle formed by the net over the fisherman’s head mid-cast, which has been frozen with a 1/640 sec shutter speed and perfectly focused with a f/2.8 aperture, frames all the action in the scene.
And within this golden-yellow triangular frame we see a range of other shapes, including the narrow oval canoe and various lines and layers created by folds in the net, all of which combine seamlessly despite the presence of straight and curved lines.
The fisherman’s bright-red t-shirt glows through the net, indicating where your eye should look while complementing the dominant yellow hue of the scene. Further adding to the creative use of color is the tone of the water, which I suspect was edited slightly so the hue better matched the golden yellow.
The Travel Photographer of the Year is an annual competition covering categories from portraiture to wildlife. Amateurs and professionals alike can enter, and the 2026 edition of the competition is now underway.
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Want more travel photography award-winning images? Then how about this scene of a muddy duel to the death between a crab and a fish captured on a DSLR, which was a runner-up?
