I settled into a comfortable routine in the Kep crab village after a while. Up early to catch the sunrise and take some long exposure seascapes. Then coffee watching the sun come up over the lagoon, and then the rest of the morning shooting the crab ladies and the fishermen at work, followed by lunch/swim/snooze and more seascapes at sunset. This comprises the first set of photos in this album.




After a week I started to explore the larger Kep town around the headland, and immediately found an excellent french boulangerie and cafe next to a natural harbour. This seemed to have everything including a hotel next door so I moved in and started to photograph the seascapes of that area, and of fishing communities farther south on the coast. This is the second third of the images (the title tells you where it is).




While in Kep town, I met a delightful couple who owned Sabay Beach, a boutique retreat upriver from Kampot (the regional capital) with scenic sunset views over Bokor National Park. It sounded interesting, so I headed west and spent a delightful time eating their excellent french food, and photographing the Pruek Chhu river. These are the last 4 shots in the set, again identifiable from the titles.




One of the problems of shooting Long Exposures (LE) is that people or fishing boats that appear in the shots are blurred over the 2 minutes or so of the exposure. Most LE photographers either avoid moving subjects or edit the blurred parts out. For some of these shots, the fishing boats or fishermen were integral to the scene so I planned to include them. This involved setting up and taking the long exposure shot, then keeping the camera in place and waiting for a well positioned boat, fisherman or dog to arrive. Freezing their motion was just a matter of a faster shutter speed, but of course the water around them was then not smooth, so integrating those ripples into the smooth water of the LE frame was a challenge. In every case, all of what you see was actually in the frame, just not all at the same time.




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