Li River, Guilin

I took this photograph in the 1980s in Guilin, China. I saw the boatman riding the current as he passed under the bridge, so I ran to the other side of the road and pre-focused just above the water. When the boatman came into full view, I took the picture in early morning sunlight. The way he was turned toward the east was perfect to show the musculature of his back. Even though my settings were not recorded with the medium format film camera I was using, I remember them because, with this kind of lighting, I always used the same shutter speed and f-stop combination. With Fujichrome Velvia 50 film, my settings were 1/125 and f/5.6. The ISO was 50. The original Fujichrome transparency was scanned by an Imacon scanner to turn it into a digital file.