Sing Sing dancers

Papua New Guinea is one of those countries where you can't help but feel you've gone back in time 20,000 years. The annual Sing Sing festival, an incredible event for photographers, was originally orchestrated by Christian missionaries in the 1950’s as a way to mitigate inter-tribal warfare over ancient feuds and cultural differences. These girls of the Mt. Hagen tribe were dancing in a circle, and I squeezed my way into the middle and sat on the ground so I could get this wide angle shot from as low a perspective as possible. I took this in 1996 with a Mamiya RZ 67 and a 50mm lens (equivalent to about a 24mm in the full frame digital format), and I used Fujichrome Provia 100 which was a 6x7cm transparency film. Each slide was 2 ¼ x 2 ¾ inches. The pictures weren't sharper than what 35mm cameras produced, but they had to be enlarged less times to fill the area of a print so they appeared to be sharper. My settings were unrecorded, but they were most probably 1/250, f/11, and the film was rated at 100 ISO. The transparency was scanned by a high-end Imacon scanner to digitize the image. Back then, we didn't have high quality digital cameras, but the ability to scan slides enabled us to use Photoshop and to send photographs electronically.