African Woman
Ghana 2002
Portrait of an African woman with a dreamy expression.
I can’t tell you more about this moment…I’m pretty sure this is Accra. I can tell you that West African women love these cotton prints. They make two piece dresses and often a matching head wrap which they tie in a style that a Paris milliner would envy. The neck of the dress is very wide and often slips off one shoulder showing a lot of smooth skin and round shoulder. African women, in Western Africa, love flounces and ruffles on their dresses…especially over the hips. African women are proud of their round, high hips, no doubt because African men like round, high hips. Don’t you admire her for looking so beautiful after a day of hard physical labor?
This shot was not sharp…all I needed was to have her eyes sharp, but I didn’t manage that. Since she is such a beauty, I couldn’t bear to discard this shot and I used Topaz Simplify to soften the entire photo into a digital painting. I used just a touch of Simplify because I wanted you to see her as she was. You can do that by going to opacity after you have used the plug-in and decreasing the opacity to suit your goal.