Visiting tribes in places like Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia is like going back in time 20,000 years. I'm not exaggerating. I photographed this group of Huli tribesmen and boys in PNG during the annual Sing Sing festival-- a get together of dozens of tribes where they sing and dance dressed in their traditional face and body decorations. The midday lighting was extremely harsh, so I used fill flash to balance the exposure on the subjects with the bright sky behind them. I don't love on-camera flash, but I took this in 1996 with my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, and the contrast was simply too much for film to handle. Because the Huli smear their bodies with pig fat, the light from the flash reflected off the sheen on their skin. I had to clone most of that out because it didn't look good. My camera settings were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/250, f/8 and I used Fujichrome Provia 100 film (100 ISO).
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