A few hours before we crossed into Laos from Thailand, I was taking my morning walk along the Mekong as the sun came up, hoping I see a small fishing boat to include along with the reflection of a rising sun. When my wish was granted, I was still faced with the daunting task of making an image that would avoid the sameness of all the sunrise clichés we all make of life along a river. I had my pocket camera with me, a Canon Digital Elph, which does not offer either a long lens or a wideangle to stress an idea. I was limited to normal perspectives. The first thing I did was to shift my vantage point so the reflection of the sunrise was broken in half by a spit of land instead of being portrayed as a typical continuous line. I waited for the fisherman to start paddling, so I could get some activity into the image, instead of a fisherman just sitting or standing in his boat. That helped add some energy to the image. The sun rising on a misty river over a lone figure in his boat is a timeless image but still a borderline cliché, so I used one more option to change the atmosphere of the picture. I boosted the ISO to 400, knowing that it would give me “noise.” The noise turns the image into a form of impressionism, putting this picture somewhere between a painting and a photograph. There is dream-like quality to this image that expresses how I felt, standing on the bank of the Mekong in the mist, watching this fisherman slowly make his way home as the sun struggled to break through. I think it succeeds in overcoming a cliché label.