I photographed these young boys on stilts on my Ethiopia photo tour in 2019. We were driving on a highway, saw the kids, and stopped to take some pictures. There were two major problems: 1) This was the middle of the day and the lighting was extremely harsh, and 2) the boys were posing in the middle of the road and the background environment was uninspiring to say the least. In the original image, a solid blue sky was the background, and the road and the desert scrub made the picture look like a snapshot instead of a striking photograph. So, I meticulously selected the kids, their stilts, and the shadows they cast on the ground. I did this with the pen tool working at 200% magnification. That took a lot of time. I then composited the selection with a geothermal area in Ethiopia my photo tour group visited. I purposely chose a background with a dark sky as if a storm were approaching to make the kids stand out more. There was nothing I could do about the harsh lighting except lighten the shadows as much as possible and darken the highlights.
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