My favorite subject to photograph is wildlife, and after that, I love photographing ethnic and primitive tribes. I find it fascinating how people adorn themselves, and how different their experiences in the world are compared to mine. I photographed these Surma girls in the Omo River Valley of Ethiopia. Upon entering their village, I felt like I was transported back in time about 20,000 years. Because it was essential that both of the subjects were sharp in the photo, I used an aperture small enough to err on the side of clarifty. It would be so easy to assume they were equidistant to the camera and therefore a large aperture would be fine in the low light I was dealing with. But in situations like this, one of the girls could have been 2 or 3 inches closer to the lens than the other. At f/4.5 or f/5.6 with a 100-400mm telephoto, this would have resulted in one of them being sharp while the other one was ‘almost’ sharp. That would have ruined the image. My settings were 1/100, f/16, and 1000 ISO. The focal length setting on the lens was 248mm.
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