Photographing from his insect-like paraglider at an altitude of 500 feet, George Steinmetz is known for his beautiful aerial photography of places like the islands of the Ari Atoll in the Maldives, above. But even when he keeps his boots on the ground, he’s equally adept at searching out and capturing storytelling moments.

This post is about one of those moments.

I worked with him as his picture editor on “Rising Seas,” which appeared in the September 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The coverage for the story took him to Manila, Philippines, where some 625,000 people are squatting in crowded riverfront shanties extremely vulnerable to rising seas exacerbated by subsiding land and the threat of the next typhoon. The