This striking image of a woman dancing the chamarrita, a Portuguese dance, in Macau, China.Editor's note: Welcome to Yahoo! Travel Photo of the Week, chosen from the Flickr group created by our readers – you! Each week a professional photographer will select a photo that stands out from the crowd, and explain why they chose it. To have your own photo considered, join our Flickr group and start submitting your own photos!
A good travel photo will grab your eye and seize your curiosity; it will make you ask questions and think about things you may never have thought about before. Case in point: What’s going on here? Who is this woman? What is she doing? Where was the photograph captured? This is a good travel photo. It’s not always about technique; it’s about seizing the moment.
Today’s Yahoo! Travel Photo of the Week was captured by Vileinist, (aka: Bring Back Picnik!), in the ancient Chinese city of Macau, where local history goes back to the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). Around the year 1550, Portuguese trading ships sailed out of the South China Sea into the mouth of the Perl River, dropped anchor and, eventually, made Macau a Portuguese Colony.
In 1999, Macau was given back to China but much of the Portuguese culture remains and every year, on December 20, a celebration is held to mark the occasion.
That’s why she’s dancing in the street. Her dress is Cantonese and her dance is a Portuguese Chamarrita, a folk dance native to the Portuguese Azores. Vileinist used a Canon EOS Rebel XS with a medium wide-angle lens, to capture the image in December 2011.
Whether Vileinist was dancing, or not, we don’t know, but we do know that he was right there with her; hearing the plucky, three-quarter time Portuguese music and keeping her dead center in his viewfinder. By keeping her centered, she becomes our dance partner. Which puts us into the dance.
So hats off to Vileinist for capturing an intriguing moment, which when studied, reveals a romantic city rich in history and diverse cultures. Vileinist captioned his winning photo: “Arrival.” Was it because the photo was captured on the day he arrived in Macau and found pretty women, dancing in the streets?
Alabama-based Michael Clemmer has been a photojournalist/travel photographer, landscape and golf course photographer for over four decades. Once a Senior Travel Photographer for Southern Living Magazine, he has also worked as an assignment photographer for the National Geographic Society and his photographs have been used in fine publications around the world. He currently specializes in golf landscape photography — visit his web site at michaelclemmer.com
