When something unexpected happens on a photo shoot it is easy to get carried away in the moment and start firing away. If you've done some action photography your reflexes may take over and you'll instinctively start cropping to maximize the impact of the subject. Sometimes, though, it pays to take a deep breath and think things through first....

We had a great lesson in this type of quick thinking during our Myanmar photo tour last winter. A couple of us were scouting locations for a shoot the next evening while the rest of the group was exploring a nearby temple. We soon realized we were on the path to a favorite watering hole for local herds of goats and cattle. The dust their hooves kicked up made for a great scene in the setting sun. We even had shepherds with straw hats driving them along. At first it seemed obvious that we wanted to get in front of them for the best angle. Then we noticed that the animals started to accelerate – breaking into a bit of a run -- as they started smelling the water. So we moved out of the way a bit and started to get some shots.

Below you can see my first shot of the initial herd approaching. Clearly I had my exposure set wrong from whatever I was doing when they showed up, so I knew I needed to fix that and also think about my framing.

We got some good shots of the goats, and were really ready when a an even more dramatic herd of cattle came by. It was really tempting to use typical “action” framing – getting rid of the distracting background and focusing on the cattle as they passed (like in this image):

That’s where taking a step back (literally and figuratively) and thinking through the scene came in handy. I realized that, while a shot of passing cows in the dust was certainly interesting, the best part of the experience was that it was happening right in the middle of a famous architectural site – the Plain of Temples at Bagan, Myanmar. There were temples right in front of me, but because I was deliberately cropping out the not very helpful white sky, I had also inadvertently cropped out the temples. By zooming out I could add the well-placed silhouettes of several temples to the top right of my frame. That gave me the image below – my favorite from the shoot – that shows the action but also reveals the setting without relying on a separate caption.

If you’d like to get some images like this one – or even the many more traditional images we’ll take of the peoples, temples, and culture of Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia, please consider joining us on our Myanmar Photo tour this December. We still have a couple slots left for it and our (optional) Angkor Wat extension.