The Surma tribe

The Surma tribe in Ethiopia are not visited frequently because it’s so arduous to reach them. We took a charter flight and then drove over a brutal road for hours to reach the area in the southern part of the country where they live. There are no lodges here, so we had a campsite set up for us. Every day, it was about 100 degrees. The Burma are famous for their wild face and body decorations, and the photography was second to none. I asked these girls to pose together for a visually striking image, and I specifically chose the out of focus foliage background to give a sense of their environment, yet all of the attention is entirely directed to the subjects.. I used a 100-400mm lens set to 182mm, and the settings were 1/60, f/8, and 500 ISO with image stabilization turned on because I was handholding the camera. This was the picture I was hoping to get on this trip. On my last photo tour to Ethiopia, we couldn't reach these people because a bridge had been washed out and we couldn't cross a river.