I wanted to post a few more photos from Elephant Nature Park as a follow up to my previous post, My elephant week. But first, a little photography navel-gazing.
I picked up a new 50-200mm telephoto zoom lens (for an upcoming leg of our travels) which arrived in Chiang Mai just before I started volunteering (thanks to the parents). So I had a chance to “kick the tires” a little at the park—specifically the photos I took of the elephants bathing in the river (or on their way there). All the other photos (and all the photos I’ve taken on the trip thus far) have been with Pentax’s 21mm F3.2 “pancake” lens.
One thing I learned in the process is just how hard wildlife photography is, especially knowing that these elephants are not that wild. Just because I have a telephoto zoom does not mean I instantly take awesome photos of animals. If anything, it’s harder, because my position in the immediate vicinity affects the final picture less, so I’m more dependent on the unpredictable behavior of the animal (“Umm, excuse me Mr. Elephant, could you please go back and hold that pose a little longer?”)
The experience did teach me a lot about the type of photos I enjoy taking: ones that capture the whole scene and ones where you feel immersed in the scene, both of which favor wider angles. With the elephants, I was surprised how often I had to “step back” with my 21mm (32mm-e) lens to capture the whole elephant, or otherwise get the composition I wanted. The wide angle, prime lens makes photography feel like an active, engaging sport. The telephoto zoom lens made me feel like a static, passive observer. At least on my first outing.
And now for something a little more elephantine:
Taking a break between bitesMunchin’ on bananas (one of my favorite shots)
So I’m flipping through The Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, (36th edition: Dec 2010 to Mar 2011), and exactly halfway through the magazine, there’s an ad for MekongBank. Half the ad is an image of one of the many smiling faces from the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, portraying Buddha or Jayavarman VII—or both.
Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, 36th edition, open to page 76
Something about the photo in the ad caught my eye. Almost immediately I realized, “That’s my photo”. Not “I took a photo like that” or “I happened to take a photo of that same face”. No, “I took that very photograph”—during my second trip to Cambodia in May 2003. It happens to be one of the few photos of my own that I’ve had printed. It was hanging in our foyer in San Francisco.
I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% sure. It’s hard to fathom how many photos have been taken of the Bayon temple’s smiling faces over the years. I was willing to allow that there was a chance, however slim, that someone had taken a remarkably similar photo.
Later that day, I looked back at my photos from May 2003, compared the ad to the original, and sure enough it was my photo exactly: uncropped, same perspective, same shadows, same sliver of blue sky in the top left corner. A dead match. The shear improbability of it blew me away. Here I was, in Siem Reap, stumbling upon a photo in an ad in a free tourist guide that I had taken during my first visit nearly 8 years ago. Does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?
My original photo of a smiling face at Bayon, taken in May 2003
How did it happen? After that trip to Cambodia, I put some of my best photos online, including this one, to share with friends and family. I made the original versions of the photos available for download since they were only 2 megapixel files. I also dedicated my initial photo galleries to the public domain, which helped some of them find their way into Wikipedia and which may have been where this photo was found. Or maybe it was just a swipe from Google Images, without regard for my permissive uncopyright. Who knows?
To make a long story short, we took the guide with us on our return trip to the Bayon and actually managed to find the very same smiling face I’d photographed in 2003. Even that seemed unlikely, given the roughly 150 surviving faces, each a little different. Only a few were visible at eye-level, which made the search easier. As a souvenir, I posed next to it with the magazine.
Priceless.
A smiling Bayon face and the ad that features its likeness
Of all the places we’ve been and will go on this trip, Cambodia is the only country that I’ve traveled to previously. In fact I visited twice, both times for work, first in January 2003, and then again in May. Those dates are interesting because that’s not long after I started my blog. So there’s a record to look back on.
It’s funny to see my growth even in the 4 months between those two trips. I took 120 photos during the first trip, with my 2 megapixel Kodak, though hilariously most of them I took out the window of the plane—only 54 were taken on the ground in Phnom Penh. The shear absurdity of the journey itself (3 layovers!) partially accounts for the number of windowseat shots: Raleigh > Detroit > Tokyo > Bangkok (overnight in hotel) > Phnom Penh.
I was a shy photographer (I still am), and I was also likely overwhelmed by my first exposure to Southeast Asia. It’s hard to know what to capture when everything is different. At the time I didn’t see my blog as an outlet for photography. In the early days, embedding photos in posts was a hassle—blogging was all about text!
However, two months before that first trip I set up a web-based photo gallery (which I’ve long since converted to blog posts) so I could more easily share photos with friends and family. Realize this was before Flickr and most photo sharing sites existed. The photos I chose to share from that initial trip represent a pretty random smattering of things I saw and was able to quickly capture without drawing too much attention to myself: parked scooters, gas in glass soda bottles, shacks by the side of the river. It was a world I was wholly unfamiliar with. And of course my primary purpose there wasn’t to traipse around and explore. So I snapped what I could in the short time I had between work ending and dinner.
These were the blog posts from my first trip to Cambodia:
My second trip, only 4 months later, paints a very different picture. For one, I was there over Memorial Day—a rare three day weekend which I was encouraged to use to visit Angkor. I blogged more during the trip. And I took a lot more photos. Nearly 800. Of course much of that was due to the Angkor visit—over 500 photos. But still, not counting that excursion, I was taking a lot more photos, and not just out the plane window. It was as if I finally realized what a rare opportunity I had, and what an interesting place Cambodia was, and I wanted to capture as much as I could to share with friends, family, and the internet at large.
These were the blog posts from my second trip to Cambodia:
Just like polarized sunglasses, a polarizing lens filter reduces glare from the sunlight that reflects off water and even haze. Some comparison shots taken with and without a polarizer are nothing short of amazing, so given my predilection for landscapes, I recently picked one up and played with it for the first time this weekend.
Hoya 49mm circular polarizer
The filter screws on to the end of the lens (in my case a Pentax DA 35mm Limited) and the outer ring rotates independently so you can adjust the degree of polarization. 90° of rotation is all it takes to go from full polarization to no polarization. You can experience the same effect with polarized sunglasses by turning your head sideways while looking at a body of water.
In the course of figuring out how it worked, I ended up taking some comparison shots without really meaning to. At first the effect was quite subtle, at least until I learned what to look for.
