Jember fashion carnival, Indonesia

I’m in Indonesia now, and the first thing my tour group photographed was the Jember Fashion Carnival in which children were featured on the first day. Thanks to my wife, Indiana, we got VIP passes to go behind the scenes and photograph the kids getting made up and putting on their costumes. This was an eight year old whom I thought was particularly photogenic, and her mother was so proud that we liked photographing her daughter. The direct sunlight we had today wasn’t complimentary for portraiture, so we photographed her in the shade of a tree to get soft and diffused light. This is the ideal type of lighting for outdoor portraits. I used a 100-500mm telephoto for two reasons: I could fill the frame from several feet away, thus the young girl would feel less intimidated by a foreigner pointing a big camera at her, and I like the compression telephotos give especially when photographing people. My settings were 1/250, f/7.1, and 250 ISO. The focal length I ended up using for this composition was 223mm.