le grand bazaar

the grand bazaar of cambodia is how henri mouhot, french naturalist and ‘discoverer’ of angkor, described phnom penh, the capital of cambodia in 1863. he wasn’t very complimentary about it really but this little phrase just so perfectly encapsulates for me the buzz and activity that still characterises the city today. the image above is one of the first sights i saw from our hotel balcony.

 

we came here after being in battambang for five days. chris had been sick and we just needed somewhere to chill for a week before our flight home. on our first night we stayed in an average hotel by the river. but after settling in and walking out on to the balcony in the late afternoon, we admired the beauty of the riverside and the people taking their evening stroll, we definitely chilled.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

phnom penh is probably not the first place you’d think of going if you want to chill but, from the second night, we holed ourselves up in a nice little boutique hotel with a pool and alternated lazing by it with walking up a storm in the city – despite the stomach bug i picked up on the third day.

we saw the royal palace; took twilight promenades along the mekong with hundreds of locals (a tradition left over from the french?); ate western food shamelessly in addition to local dishes; caught dozens of tuk tuks when we were too tired to walk; shopped at the markets; saw the crazy new developments by foreign speculators going up in some parts of the city; went to the museum; tried to drive a cyclo; checked out the backpacker area in boeung kak; had massages; hung out and drank cocktails in the colonial luxury of the foreign correspondants club; and  just generally enjoyed the sights and being lazy.

i don’t know why so many of my film images are of bikes. i must have been fixated. i promise that i did take digital shots of other things!

down the river

 

today some more black & white film shots from cambodia. i’m so enjoying reminiscing about this trip!

after 10 days in siem reap we dragged ourselves away from its amazing temples and decided to travel to battambang along the river. chris had done it before and told me it was a fascinating four hour journey along the sangker river, leaving from the famous tonle sap lake and has been rather nicely described thus:

an interesting and very scenic journey along small rivers, the boats thread their way through numerous charming floating villages and past dozens of towering cantilevered fishing net installations. 

it was all this and more. as we sailed along it was beautiful to daily life go by.

now, we knew that sometimes it could take a bit longer … our guidebook said four to seven hours … which we though would be fine. but the water level was horrendously low, meaning that it was a very very very very … very slow trip.

we got bogged many a time (yes in a river) and the crew used poles to get us out, the wooden seats felt like rock after about 5 hours, the diesel engine smell got quite sickening and then the engine broke down … twice.

but our ingenious crew pulled half the boat apart, bailed out some of the bilgewater, took stuff out of the engine and tinkered for an hour or so and we were on our way.

fourteen hours after we left our siem reap hotel we arrived in battambang. we stood up (thank god!) jumped in an airconditioned cab, checked into our lovely new hotel room with giant bed, showered and then went out and had a well deserved dinner with cold beer in the balmy evening air.

but you know what? after all the getting stuck & engine fumes & hard seats & broken engines. it was a magical ride along the river just as billed, an adventure that i’m so glad that i got to embark upon. really, in my book, these things make the journey exciting and unpredictable and are what it’s all about in the end. who always wants to always be comfortable and know what’s around the corner?

i’d definitely like to do it again … in wet season …

magical

i’ve been posting a lot of new photos lately … mainly polaroids as i’ve been sooooo busy starting the phd and all.  polaroids are so surprisingly easy to pop out and scan … truly instant gratification … kind of!

so i decided it was time to have a bit of a look backward at some of my older images. it was lovely rediscovering these from our trip to cambodia in february 2010. they were shot at preah khan, one of the amazing temples in the angkor complex near siem reap. while i loved the famous ta prohm, preah khan gave you a bit more of that overgrown abandoned tomb raider magic without the crowds. i had somewhat of an ethical problem with going to angkor so at least the less touristed sites like this abated my qualms somewhat – if only while i was there. i’m still internally divided on the heritage and social ethics of this type of tourism but i have to say it was such a magical place – with lovely warm people and amazing sites – that the minute i arrived, i was glad that i came.

while i do love shooting the amazing eye-popping colours of south-east asia in in colour, i wanted to explore the angkor’s temples on black & white film. i guess it was my attempt to evoke that old fashioned feel of the photography of yesteryear and reflect the mystery and magic of those amazing old black & white photographs of jungle temples. hope you enjoy, more on my flickr stream …

the good with the bad

in my last post i showed you some images from kuala lumpur that i just loved. i remember when i got them developed and looked at the film strips and was so excited by what i saw in that tiny 35mm image. when i first scanned them i got excited again and went ‘wow  i love these’. when i was cropping and resizing them the other day again i thought how much i loved them. when i posted them i was so pleased as punch at the way they looked on the blog.

but with these i felt the opposite. they were shot in cambodia just a few days after the ones that i adored.

i hated most of them, thought the grain was awful, i’d had the camera set on the wrong film speed so they were all underexposed (and forgot to tell the lab when i got them developed), opened the back because the film kept slipping, let lots of light in, got flare on heaps of the photos, and thought the colours were almost all hideously green.

how depressing.

but i did see some potential in them - subjects, framing and lighting that had inspired me in the first place. so i did a bit of naughty photoshopping, played with the levels and colour balance somewhat (although as little as possible). i ended up recovering a few, including some i’ve posted previously here and here.

now, many were not salvageable or apparently so. some grew on me. they are not great photos, but as luke skywalker said about  darth vader ’there’s good in [them] still’. so some of them still spoke to me and i ruminated on all the blogs i’ve read about seemingly terrible photos that grow on us, that we can still see the beauty in despite their initial apparent crapness. some would say this is just an excuse for crap photography. but i think i agree with the former sentiment.

tonight i had a terrible shoot. i’ve been thinking for weeks about shooting the pretty lights & sets of the melbourne international comedy festival. and you know what … i didn’t feel the love. the digital shots were boring, the film shots … who knows. but i wasn’t inspired. anyways, you never know … i may grow to love them!

maybe i shouldn’t be showing my failures here. but i want this blog to be honest … so i am being so.

恭喜发财 (gōng xǐ fā cái)

i love chinese new year! partly because it often falls in the weeks around my birthday so i get fireworks to celebrate! i love the colour & the ceremony & the joy put into this celebration. and it goes on for two weeks, unlike the western new year! this year we went to chinese new year celebrations in bourke street, melbourne. the parade kicked off fabulously with lion and dragon dances by the chinese youth society of melbourne. but, being melbourne, it then suddenly bucketed down with rain on everyone. we went for cover in the nearest chinese restaurant. later, with very full stomachs, we got front row seats for some more great lion dance blessings. this weekend we’re heading to sydney & will be checking out the remainder of new year celebrations there too!

chinese (lunar) new year is very big in australia with our big communities of chinese, vietnamese and others who celebrate the occasion. australian cities do it in grand style, with perhaps the biggest event being the new year parades with the fabulous lion dances a big hit. lion dance is a special form of kung fu and many schools have a lion dance team. a lot of schools also have their students performing their kung fu skills for the audience as they follow their lion in the parade. i got to go in the sydney parade one year with my school & it was such a buzz to march in front of those enormous crowds.

last year we spent the chinese new year period in kuala lumpur & cambodia. it was really exciting to be in asia for it & new year fell on my actual birthday while we were in siem reap. they don’t do it quite so big there but there was still a morning lion dance performance for the restaurant beside our hotel & people burning money for good luck & lots of firecrackers. i got so excited, i went a little crazy with photos.

ps do you know that gōng xǐ fā cái (mandarin) & gung hay fat choy (cantonese) don’t actually literally mean happy new year? they mean ‘congratulations and prosperity’. i never knew that till today!

housekeeping: an experiment

so folks, i’m doing a bit of an experiment that I hope helps me deal with my backlog of images. i’ve got a bit of a double up situation where i post images on my blog, then post exactly the same images on flickr. it’s taking up quite a bit of my time needless to say adding tags, adding to groups etc etc.

i love that i get heaps of views on flickr but i’d like more people to actually look at my blog. so how do i deal with this? do i keep flickr as a kind of portfolio with lots of images & only put one or two on the blog and then direct people from here to flickr & vice versa? or do i put lots here, as i’ve been doing lately, then put only a few on flickr & get people to come from there?

in a way the latter option would seem more sensible as a lot of people might not bother going to the blog when they’ve seen everything already on flickr. so i’ve decided to go with the latter: post a few from each post on flickr and then direct people to the blog. let’s see how that goes.

any ideas from you bloggers/flickr users out there who’ve experienced similar issues? i’d love to hear your experiences!