Revisiting Cambodia

One of the most wonderful things about photography is that it allows us to revisit events of the past. I spent the other weekend printing some old negatives that I purchased off Ebay from the 50's, 60's and some glass negatives from the 1890's, but that is a story for a different time.

This time, I delved into the digital archives and went back a little over a year to a trip we made to Cambodia.  As is often the case these days, I had not finished going through the images I had captured back then.  So I found hidden gems that I fully remember taking but had forgotten I had not finished processing them. 

The picture above, taken with my Leica ME camera and a Zeiss 35mm lens, was selected and carefully positioned to have the statue on the right third balanced with the tree growing out of the rock on the left third. I had imagined this to be a B&W image, but as I processed it the glowing green moss pushed me to leave it in color.

Some of the images I had processed but the revisit allowed me to look at them again, and tried different techniques.  Above, an ancient hallway, long open to the elements, shows some magnificent stone carvings as well as an ancient plaza.  I had originally selected this as a B&W image, initially taken by the focus on the texture of the rock that B&W allows.  In this second pass, I liked the highlights of blue and green with the warm sun reflecting into the old hallways.  And so, a second attempt at this image was made.

The next image was taken at a temple during a prayer.  Again I had selected a B&W processing, because this is what I saw at the moment of taking the image.  My second pass highlighted some of the wonderful colors, in fact, I was forced to reduce the saturation a bit as it was far too strong for my taste.

The floating Vietnamese village was difficult to capture as the compositions were not very obvious.  My first pass, did not result in any keepers however on this second pass I found a few that more or less work.  Here we have a local delivery man, almost like a mail man in these parts, going about his daily route. There was an odd haze that day, one of the issues with the pictures taken, as it covered the clouds and did not help the images at all.  This time around, I am more focused on the people, their houses and the deliveryman's boat.