Image 1 - I stumbled upon this beautiful pond at a small and remote restaurant in the rice-fields of Bali. I had walked for some distance along the narrow divides that separate adjacent rice paddies, and had passed through several small communities en route. The restaurant itself was on a raised open-air platform, and had a roof but no walls. It looked out across a patchwork of rice crops, some green and some golden. The Balinese people are always welcoming and hospitable, and the owner of the property was delighted to show me his magnificent pond.
The lotus has various forms in different countries but is a persistent ornament in architecture. In the Hindu world, it is a pink aquatic plant rather like a water lily whose flowers and leaves tend to stand above the surface of the water. In this case only the flower stands proud, but my kindly host assured me that this was the local lotus flower - perhaps a water lily. The picture was created using a 105mm short telephoto lens, with the tripod-mounted camera balanced precariously in the mud at the pond\\\'s edge. There were hundreds of flowers in the large pond, but I chose this isolated group because they formed a tight but asymmetrical composition.