Foto Friday 09 – The Young Boy and the Lake

Not a Hemingway Story. Of North Sumatra Sunsets and Waterfalls.

Sunset at Lake Toba, North Sumatra, April 2011

We arrived at Lake Toba five minutes late and missed the ferry to go to Samosir Island. You can see the island in the background, the sun setting behind the hills. It started to drizzle while we were waiting and taking a few photos at the dock. My friend took a shot of me scanning the lake when a young boy came rowing through my frame. Check his frame for a POV change, and if you’re curious about framing when it comes to fiction, I recommend you check out Kate’s podcast “Framing Fiction | Episode 27” over on

The Matterhorn: truth in fiction

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Looking at how I framed this post, you will notice that I anchored the reader’s expectations through the title and subtitle. I made a pact with my audience, one I must honour, hence the young boy in his boat on a lake. Of course, you may expect more than this and rightly so, but what you won’t expect is an Old Man and the Sea kind of story. That right there is intertextuality hard at work, and if we share the same pretext, then this overlap will ensure that such references are picked up on and require no explanation. We’re in the same zone. It’s a fine place to be. We understand each other. We revel in recognising these nods and links that add another layer to the text. It’s our secret.

I have often referred to Graham Allen’s “Intertextuality” in this context, as it covers the subject extensively and clearly explains how Intertextuality¹ is employed throughout history. I could write an essay on this topic alone. I did write a dissertation on “Forms and Functions of Quotes and Allusions in Selected Novels by Terry Pratchett – An Intertextual Analysis,” but this is Foto Friday, and we have more of Lake Toba to consider!

As beginnings go, we have already covered the Where, When and Who. In creative writing terms, a good opening covers all the five “W”s, or so some may tell you. They do have a point. I wrote about Openings here a while back if you want to check that out.

On Openings

The Why and the What are equally important, and while it’s nice to have all five in the opening paragraph of your story, it is by no means obligatory to have them all. You may only have one W, and that’s fine as long as the reader is hooked. There’s the rub. You can have all the Ws in the world, adhere to all the Creative Writing rules (there are no rules) and tips (Aristotle’s Poetics²), and it will all be for nought if your audience is not engaged. Remember your pact. Deliver on that. Right. It’s Foto Friday. Lake Toba.

Why was I there?

I was hired to do a photo shoot for Traditional Batak fashion designer Merdi Sihombing, to take photos in various locations on Samosir Island for a book of his. Exciting! You can find some of the shots here.

What was I doing?

I was taking hundreds of photos from early morning until late into the night with a stellar crew and one brave model who was so close to the waterfall in one of the locations I had only one or two seconds to take a shot before having to wipe the water off the lens again, standing knee-deep in the reddish-brown pool, sprayed by gusts of water incessantly. Intense! What else was intense was the sunset. See for yourself!

Sunset Hill, North Sumatra, 2011

It may not seem that way, but the location at the waterfall was treacherous. We had an unfortunate incident where someone slipped on the mossy stones, fell into the water and broke his camera on the rocks below. The lens was shattered and torn out of the mount. Lucky him, he only sustained some bruises but nothing broken. It could have been much worse, but in that moment, the most painful thing to behold was that broken lens and camera.

I took the below shot around the same time he fell, a few steps outside the frame to the right.

Batak Fashion shoot, Samosir Waterfall, 2011

In closing, I hope to fulfil our pact and meet your expectations, dear reader and viewer and offer another point-of-view, the last shot from this location. A long exposure of the waterfall, developed in black and white, framed and ready to be mounted on your wall. Interested?

Samosir Waterfall, North Sumatra, 2011

As always, here’s a little tune to round out this Foto Friday and commence the weekend with Gary Moore’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” from 1986, mainly because I can’t get Dan’s post on Restless Natives and Local Heroes out of my head, esp. since I am a Mark Knopfler fan. Thanks,

Daniel O’Donnell

. 😅

Gary Moore is a legend. RIP. And no, it’s not an original Nightwish song, and yes, Led Zeppelin has a song with the same title, completely unrelated, based on the traditional song³ and also excellent.

Feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post and share it with a friend so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏

1. “Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text.” (Wikipedia)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle) | Poetics on Gutenberg

3. Over the Hills and Far Away (Traditional Song)