Album: Angkor Photos
This is one of my most popular images of Angkor Wat/Ta Prohm. I had just come out of the maze of tunnels I took to get to this courtyard, and stopped just outside of the door because there was another photographer with a tripod in the area I wanted to set up. As I waited I noticed the tree root and the textures of it. Then I noticed the stone and its textures. I started setting up with the photographer still in frame. It was early and I knew I would not have long before some other tourists would wander into the courtyard. As soon as the photographer left, I made my exposure. Just as I did a group of tourists walked into the frame.
It was not one of the images that caught my eye immediately as I started going through an edit ten years ago. It was not one of the several 4x5s that I remembered most because the others had much more thought going into them. A lot of time I would return for a shot the next year after reviewing the shot from a 6x7 and re-shoot on the larger format.
I really had no way to print all of my negs for many years. Once while visiting my family I used a friend's darkroom to proof the big negatives and decided to give this one to my mother for a Christmas Present. It was in her living room for years and the more I looked at it the stronger it became for me. When she died I inherited it back and it soon became a favorite. The silver-gelatin print I made still did not seem to have the quality I saw in the negative. I had a friend scan it for me and made my corrections for brightness and contrast in Photoshop and the prints began to 'sing' in a way I had hoped.
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You are unlikely to see any photos of this Aqua Duct Ruins anywhere else. It is on the long road between temples and very few tourists stop to see it since it lacks the impressiveness of the main temples.I enjoyed it as one of a very few quiet places in Angkor, and it stayed quiet most of the day. Photographed with my 4x5 view camera.
Most photos that you see of The Bayon in Angkor Thom are similar shots of some of the dozens of faces of the king. If you had a chance to wander around The Bayon, you would know it is so much more than the faces. It is easy to lose yourself in the mazes of hallways and passages that weave in and out of the temple. Unlike Angkor Wat it is not laid out in perfect rectangles. Instead it is a series of complex angles of walls and passages, that I tried to capture a bit with this photograph.
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After my third or fourth visit to Angkor Wat, when I had rid myself of the syndrome of "OOH... let's get some pictures of the faces!" I started to explore The Bayon more thoroughly. As with any of the temples it is an effort of climbing and sometimes even crawling over stones. I was particularly taken aback by the way the sunlight hit the weathering on these stone columns. I did manage to capture one of the faces though. It is between the two columns on the left. If I had not, I might not have known all of these years later that it is The Bayon. This was taken with my 4x5 field camera.
This scene of Preah Khan only exists in the minds of those who passed through it before 1998. Since then the blocks were picked up and put in some order from where they fell. It is another very dark area that took a long exposure with my 4x5 camera. Although they are not as impressive at first glance as some of the more magnificent angles of the temples, I took them to give a feel as to what visiting Angkor was really like for those of us who wandered the temples mazes; and sometimes just sat in solitude and wondered about the people who built them so long ago. There are many very interesting temples to see around Angkor Wat. Once you have seen Angkor Wat, though, the others seem to lose their impressiveness. I used to do Photo Tours and always took my clients to the smaller temples first, saving the Granddaddy until last.
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