As promised, Part 2 of our Siem Reap post. This post is directed toward the fellow photographers out there, as it is jam-packed with my D-league tips about photographing the various temples.
Angkor Wat
We went to Angkor for sunrise on our first morning after reading multiple reviews that shit is supposed to be legendary. Apparently, everybody else read the same thing because it was blown up 45 minutes before the sun even rose. There's a reflective pool in front and I literally had no chance at a prime spot for photos even after waking up at 4 a.m. The sunrise itself was aight, but I feel like nothing can be spiritual/transcendent/whatever you wanna call it, if you are surrounded by a thousand other people fighting for space, talking, and inappropriately using flash photography.
Despite the hordes of assholes (who marked off my totally original idea), the temple itself is pretty insane. Similar to what we experienced at Wat Pho in Bangkok, the level of care and detail on literally every single inch of these edifices is insane. When I was younger I spent over a month living in a monastery near Surat Thani, Thailand. Each day, we would spend multiple hours raking the leaves and sand around our home as a sort of meditation. The intricacy and duplicity of many of the patterns at thehad to have been created by practitioners with incredible skill, patience and focus that reminds me of the frame of mind I was in while raking (minus the skill part). The only other explanation is slavery and scare tactics. It probably was a mixture of the two. In terms of photography, the galleries, long corridors around the exterior with elaborate carvings depicting stories and scenes from the period they were created in, possess endless opportunities. I pretty much arbitrarily shot scenes that I thought looked cool, but I really can't say if I captured the the flyest shit. Three of my big take-aways from shooting these scenes:
1. Frame the edges in places that don't cut off crucial parts of a scene
2. Use your guide lines in your view finder to line up natural edges, pay attention to being crooked or it'll look like doo doo, and focus on natural symmetry
3. Shoot straight on (use an off camera flash at a hard angle to get more contrasted shadows),or shoot from low down looking up (just like the way it looks)
You can climb to the top of Angkor, but you'll have to wait in line for a half hour. The view is supposed to be incredible, but again you are surrounded by other tourists. We skipped this. Ta Prohm
This is a decent sized temple complex is famous for the trees (strangler figs) that grow out of the ruins with their roots giving off the appearance of melted candle wax dripping over the walls. It's also famous because several scenes from Tomb Raider (haven't seen it myself) were filmed there. We hit this place up at around 11:30am when most other people (read: corny Chinese tour groups) are having lunch. It was by no means empty, but with a little patience and wandering it was easy enough to frame shots absent of wandering Chesters. The carvings at this spot didn't really stand out from other temples, but it still is extremely aesthetically pleasing primarily due to the intersection of natural and manmade elements at play.
PHOTO TIPS: Timing: It's in the middle of the forest, so it doesn't seem like either sunrise or sunset hours would really make as a huge difference here as some other spots. If you want it to yourself come early in the morning...maybe it'll be misty and full of light shafts filtering through the trees.
Lenses: I would go for the widest lens you have (for me that's 18mm on full frame) and get right up on the roots of those trees shooting up.
Light: When we visited there was intermittent cloud cover that when removed provided exciting moments of bright, warmly colored, spot lit light on the ruins. While exciting to the human eye, it honestly was too bright to be captured handheld and get the shadows exposed properly as well(too much contrast). If you wanted to take the time to set-up a tripod and shoot several bracketed photos with the intent doing HDR(high dynamic range) processing you could probably come up with some gems. That said the time it takes to set-up the tripod, frame the shot and pick your exposures would make me feel stressed about blocking other people's shots and/or having them walk through one of the frames. This logic about HDR/tripods/contrasty sunlight applies to pretty much all of the more popular temples. If you are trying to get a perfectly exposed stunner get there real early or have a menacing body guard hold off the hordes. Angkor Thom/Bayon
Angkor Thom is a large complex of temples clustered together. We went in the late afternoon and spent most of our time focusing on Bayon. Bayon is known for having lots of faces carved into its 58 pillars(symbolizing the former 58 districts of Cambodia at the time it was built...apparently I sometimes did listen to the guide). It also has quite amazing galleries, where the carvings are deeper/more 3D than most of the other temples I observed. As a singular temple evaluated on it is man made merits, I'd have to say was the most impressive to me. It is both quite large and chock full of detailed work on many scales (large faces and smaller accents/gallery scenes). There is a small reflective pool/moat on the west side of the temple, which makes for a nice shot with the late afternoon sun hitting the temple. Banteay Srei
On second day we watched the sun rise over a wetland near Preah Kahn, but did not have time to actually check out this complex(something I deeply regret and was an area of contention with our guide). Instead we headed about 45 minutes away by car to Banteay Srei, which is an extremely small temple renowned for its unique use of pink sandstone and delicate carvings. We arrived here before 7:30am with only about 3 others at the complex. The light was orangey and absolutely beautiful setting the temple aglow. It was a very lovely scene, especially without the large groups of folks that descended an hour later as we were leaving.
Banteay Srei Butterfly Sanctuary
I really love shooting pictures of butterflies and macro subjects in general. Last April/May I made a trip to Tanzania with my pops to aid and document a vegetation mapping project he and some plant dork cronies hooked up (mostly went because it sounded incredible). We spent a lot of the time in the field doing surveys, large parts of which I was entirely unqualified to participate in. During these parts me and a guy named Eriki spent a lot of time chasing butterflies, beetles and grasshoppers and trying to take pictures of them. It's tough work because different butterflies have different personalities and some of those personalities including major ADHD i.e. they never frickin' land. Imagine my joy upon scouring the map of the outer Siem Reap to discover a butterfly sanctuary. There was a lot of joy.For $2 a pop Stacey and I were invited to a 20 foot high mesh tent full of flitting behemoths. I had my 200mm macro lens all hooked, but really most of these suckers were so big I could have shot them with another lens. On top of this you'd swear they had most of the butterflies dosed up on Ritalin because once they landed they kicked it, posed, made out with a nearby butterfly and then posed some more. I never felt so calm and relaxed shooting macro before. I kind of felt like I was cheating. We were the only tourists there and the volunteer guides were super informative and eager to show us the various butterfly nurseries, giant walking sticks, and every species of butterfly there. They could tell we were excited to be there and totally matched our enthusiasm. I highly recommend this spot if you want a little switcherooski from your temple circuit. We exited the sanctuary at a little after 3. Our guide at this point wanted to call it a day. After a fair amount of nudging I talked everybody into begrudgingly swinging by one more temple. I was annoyed by this interaction. A real salty dog.
Phnom Kulum/1000 Lingas
After Banteay Srei we continued towards this mountain area to the north that both of my parents had highly recommended we check out. Basically, there is a river running over underlying stone that has 1000 carvings in it that leads up to a spectacular waterfall. Sounds pretty dope in concept, right? Well, just as in Bangkok, Cambodia was also celebrating its own river festival for 3 of days we were there (evidence of this celebration had already been presented along the river in Siem Reap).
As we approached the ticketed entry point to the narrow dirt road up to Phnom Kulum, I could immediately see that shit was blown up with hundreds of Cambodians packed in many different types of vehicles all waiting to get their tickets checked in order to proceed up the windy mountain road through the jungle. The procession of vehicles up the road to the river was ridiculous and seemed to follow no certain rules or logic. Our driver repeatedly cut others he deemed as going to slow off in what amounted to nothing more than repeated games of chicken. The road up was beautiful and the sheer amount of dust kicked up into the air created a plethora of distinct light beams shooting through the forest canopy.
After about 40 minutes on this road we arrived at an area where people had decided to start parking their cars. The whole area was basically like being at a crowded event in a large jungly dustbowl. Fortunately, the irrational racist in me was able to file this under the: cultural experience category because pretty much all of the people there were Cambodian. Their was nothing tranquil about any of it, but it was one hell of a scene. Cambodians praying, eating, laughing, throwing money in a molding of Buddha's footprint and bathing themselves in holy water. The 1000 carvings were for the most part little more than round circles and other geometric shapes carved in the stream bed. They were cool mostly in concept. By the time we got to check out the waterfall traffic had become so senselessly clogged that there was no movement at all for 15 minutes. We left and told the driver to make it as far down the mountain as possible where we would walk and catch up to him. The waterfall itself was a beautiful cascading monster, but was predictably strewn with around 2000 bathing Cambodians. We returned to the car and made our way down the hill.
I honestly cannot provide a fair evaluation of this place because it was so crowded. It does take a car, money and time to get there and as such I found another somewhat distant excursion to Beng Melea(reviewed below) to be way iller myself. Beng Melea
After the debating the merits of giving guides extended lunch breaks and cutting the tour short at 3:30 the day before with Stacey (I'll let you guess which position each of us took), I was feeling like I had missed out on some stuff I wanted to see. In my research on the area, I had heard about a more distant Temple complex called Beng Melea that had been discovered more recently and not restored at all. After peeping some pictures, I decided I couldn't miss it. We rose at 4:45 the next morning and hopped on a tuk-tuk for 2 hours to reach it. If you can get a car for decent price you can perhaps cut the ride time in half (and dust intake by approximately 912%), but I'm a cheap SOB (as we have and will continue to cover).
Getting to Beng Melea is early is absolutely worth it. From 7-9 a.m. there were maybe 2 other people in the entire large complex. In its unrestored state adorned with morning mist the solitude of climbing around the crumbling, vine strangled ruins was damn near magical. It is not a huge site, but the aesthetically we (maybe just me) needed until about noon to inspect the full surroundings. A steady flow of loud Chinese tourists start flowing in at around 10 am, at this point the light isn't as good and some of the magic dies. We headed back to Siem Reap around noon for a delicious lunch at Genevieve's.
We had a wonderful time in Siem Reap and would love to explore more of Cambodia on another trip. For to see all of our photos from Siem Reap please visit the gallery.
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