Massai Portrait

I have wanted to shoot an editorial style massai portrait image for a while. What I was looking to produce was a more high key atmospheric shot, featuring the landscape as well as the subject, preferably early morning when the light is low but still bright and slightly warm.

Of course it’s great to have a nice concept but often as in this shoot, the conditions were not perfect. We had a short window to shot, some restrictions as to getting out of the vehicle and a cloudy morning.

I shot with a 60mm 2.8 and my 80-200 2.8 from inside the 4×4 vehicle to get the look I wanted I switched to manual exposure opened up the iris to blow out the highlights then added a combination of filters to selectively bring tone and detail back into the shot.

In all I took just 3-4 images at various focal lengths with the massai casually walking.
The in camera techniques would have been almost impossible to achieve in film without Polaroid tests and lots of bracketing. The instant feedback I got was crucial to getting the look I wanted. Naturally I also shot a couple of standard exposure images focusing more on composition.