Himba Mother and Daughter

Flies are a part of life in Namibia and they seem to go virtually unnoticed

by the indigenous people. Question is, would you clone out the fly?

THOUGHT PROVOKING...REGARDS

Fantastic portrait!  Personally, I would not remove the fly.  It is my thinking that in this particular portrait, the fly is part of their story.  There is great depth in this portrait.  Cheers!

I would NOT remove the fly--it's a part of the context I don't think you want to lose. I would, however, fix the white balance?

...for taking the time to comment. I have to agree with Kim and Les that the fly should stay, it is aesthetically not pleasing, but it is a fact of life in Namibian bush.

Les, you raise another interesting issue, white balance. I found this quite difficult to judge, and after trying some adjustments in ACR I went back the AWB balance "as shot". But, you are right - I revisited the raw image and found that it was actually far from optimal. There is such a huge variation in how this appears on different monitors (I used a color tuned monitor, but view PN on an old laptop) - so how did you spot the need for a fix? Really, it is background that helps with the adjustment, and I had more of that in the original than you could see. Adjusting by the skin tone is very difficult (and probably where I went wrong) because the Himba apply a paste of powdered red ochre, which gives them a wonderful, rich red, but unnatural, skin color. I guess I am making a case for measuring color temp.  before exposure...thanks Les for your insight.

Cheers, RickDB

A fine piece of work Rick.

I agree on the fly but would leave the wb etc. as is.  The thing is that the earth and, therefore the dust, is very red and gives that glow to everything.  I think that stripping any of it away does not improve the image.  I like the original image.

A very emotional and heart rending documentary portrait. PLEASE LEAVE AS IS. Unless you have a white balance card shot in the same light, please leave that alone too. If this was shot in raw, you may want to change it to portrait mode (if it's not done already). The subject is so powerful that I'm not much bothered about the white balance or contrast. Also a question, what happened on the child's head?

The red ochre the Himba use to color their skin - and protect them from the sun - does make color balance a challenge. Indraneel, the baby girl has the beginnings of a plait on her head, it will be shaved off when she reaches puberty - attached pic shows how it will look as she gets older. Cheers, RickDB

Thanks Rick for the explanation and another very nice portrait. A fly in this one would look out of place! The braid looks cool, although on the baby, for a moment I thought it was something unfortunate. In hindsight, I can see why you were thinking of cloning out the fly. The mother and daughter's faces look a bit sad, but it might just be my erroneous interpretation of facial expression. It is a tough call as to what to do with the fly. But, since this is not posed, you probably can leave the fly as is. Besides, it is too close to the eye to mess with. As documentary or travel, it's probably better to leave the fly.

... I've never thought so much about a fly! but your image is worth it...

Just want to point out that the red values in my edit are HIGHER than those in the original post--I have not stripped out the red, but removed the veiling color cast.

...It was mainly the magenta that was out of whack and gave the image an out of balance look. I also found that increasing the Red improved the shot. Cheers, RickDB