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This photograph was taken from a window plane during a business trip to Singapore from Jakarta, Indonesia. As a photographer, I always have my camera ready whenever traveling with an airplane because you never know what you’ll encounter. The perspective of bird eye view is always magnificent and unique especially from 30,000 feet above the ground. It was in the early morning around 11 and the sun was just right in front of me thus creating specular highlight on shiny surfaces like water from the ocean or river. I was lucky to have this scene where the river was in a perfect position to form an “S” shape that was accentuated by the reflections on the sun in a 45 degrees angle.  I managed to snap only a couple shots before the angle changed and the specular highlight disappeared. As a rule of thumb, when shooting from a position where one is in a limited mobility, I always put my exposure mode to automatic just to make sure I can respond to candid moments like this.
There was a big difference in exposure values between the highlight and the rest of the shadow and mid tones, 5 stops to be precise.  This kind of scene is perfect for creating a dramatic low-key photographic ambiance, so in postproductions I manage to blacken all the surrounding area by decreasing the value of the shadow thus leaving only the highlight intact to create a dramatic atmospheric photography.
Exposure: 1/250 - f/8 - ASA 100