One of the highlights of a trip to Namibia is a visit with the Himba people. I arranged to have an interpreter help us get the pictures we want, and we were welcomed warmly by the chief of the tribe before we started photographing.
Stepping into a Himba village is like going back in time thousands of years, and it’s a remarkable experience culturally as well as photographically. In addition to visiting a village, I arranged to take pictures of some Himba models in tall grass which I felt made a very attractive natural environment. We photographed mostly women and young girls because they have such a unique and stylized hairstyle and dress. It is customary to smear their bodies and hair with a mixture of ochre and goat fat, and this accounts for their red color.
I used mostly my 70-200mm medium telephoto hand held, occasionally switching to a wide angle for unique perspectives. I made sure that we took the pictures in the early morning and just before sunset for the best lighting, and everyone in my group took awesome images. I used 200 ISO, although in one shot where an older woman was inside a hut I was forced to bump the ISO up to 5000 because it was so dark. The image is definitely full of noise, but I didn’t want to blast the scene with the artificial lighting of a flash.
I will be posting more pictures of the Himba on my website when I return home next week.
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