Author: DMcA

Its been a while since I did much black and white photography, but it often lends itself to photos of people, particularly when their eyes or appearance communicate in some way. The first set of shots were taken in and around Phnom Penh and on the train down to Kep – a great ride with few tourists and lots of great Cambodian passengers. About half of these shots were taken on my Pixel phone, and half on my OM1 mirrorless camera. Which ones are which?




The second set were taken in colour around the fishing village in Kep town, either of subsistence fishing in the lagoon, or the beautiful and vibrant children of the stilt huts on the water.




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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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Before the original jetty and lagoon were destroyed by developers, the crab ladies used to wade out to the deeper water in front of the market to bring back the catch from the fishing boats. Now they have been banished to a poorly made crushed rock jetty to the south of the village and the water is too deep to wade out. The crab ladies perch uncomfortably on the jetty to bring in the baskets and sort through them. They don’t seem to have lost their sense of humour and they allowed me to photograph them bringing in the catch and then sorting through it with good grace.




Crab is not the only catch, and men and women also forage for fish in the lagoon in front of the restaurants. They employ an interesting method, in which they swat the surface of the water repeatedly, presumably to usher the shoals into nets which they have previously laid. Seeing people standing waist deep in the water hammering the surface is always somehow comforting. The method seems to work, and the fish is delicious.




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The crab market at Kep is the beating heart of the village. It supplies fresh and cooked seafood to locals and traders as well as to the dozen or so seafood restaurants that line the lagoon. At one end it is open to the bright sunlight, and at the other it is dark and saturnal, lit only by overhead bulbs from above and the charcoal fires of the cooking ovens from below.




The market crab ladies are either cooking the catch or bargaining and trading with customers – either way they are as mysterious and striking as their fellow crab ladies on the jetties.




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Kep is a small fishing village on the southern coast of Cambodia. The main catch is crabs, which are brought in and sold by a collection of remarkably graceful and colourfully dressed crab ladies. Early one October morning in 2013 I photographed the crab ladies at work and these shots have remained some of the most evocative I have taken in the far east. In 2023, almost exactly 10 years later, I returned to Kep to spend a week photographing the work and activity of the village, and the regrettable changes that have been wrought on it by developers. Fortunately the crab ladies turned out to be as elegant, strong and beautiful as ever.




This first series of shots are portraits of the crab ladies at work or waiting for the catch. I could swear that some of these faces are the same as I shot 10 years ago, but who knows. You can see the 2013 photos in the “street” dropdown above and check for yourself.




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My oldest friend M has built schools all over the third world for most of his life. As he says, education of children is an essential part of enfranchising the population. If you can’t read or write, you don’t know if you are being exploited in land contracts, you can’t use a computer and you can’t properly run a business. The KHEN organisation in Cambodia, led by the excellent Mr Bunlee Khun has constructed approaching 150 school buildings all in the Battambang area in western Cambodia, most of them with funding raised by M. We have been proud to help a little in this work, and the photos here are of the main primary and nursery schools that we have funded. It’s genuinely moving to see these bright, clever boys and girls enjoy learning and building some kind of future for themselves.




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In September 2023 I travelled again to Cambodia to see my old friends M&P. The purpose was to catch up with progress at a little school we had helped to build, as well as generally loaf around and take some street and seascape photos. Our schools are all located in the area of Batambang province, so we always stay in Batambang before visiting. It’s the second largest city in Cambodia, with a long history, and some excellent street food. The markets are always a good place to find the soul of a city, and there are a couple of excellent ones here.




For these shots I used a 12 year old camera, the tiny mirrorless Nikon 1 V3, with a 27mm equivalent lens. This was an amazing piece of technology, which was eventually discontinued by Nikon because the sensor was regarded by the market as too small compared to its competitors. A shame because everything else about the systems – extremely fast and accurate autofocus, tiny size, low weight and excellent lenses, made it quite unique then and now. I thought the system was dead so sold my entire kit. But now the latest AI processing software is able to magic the files produced by the V3 into images as good as anything else I have used for street work, so the system rides again! See what you think, compared perhaps to my earlier Cambodia market shots.




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In addition to being a great place for watching and photographing the aurora, the Lofoten islands are extraordinarily beautiful. There is not a building or fisherman’s shack out of place, and there are magnificent vistas wherever you turn. We were based in the small fishing town of Reine, just south of the famously photogenic village of Hamnoy. Most of these photos were taken in the 20km or so north or south of Reine, and other than a few, I have tried to avoid the more popular views of the area, which appear on many a postcard and Instagrammers account.




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In the long days where there was no photographable aurora, we took other photographs, mostly shots of land and sea. In the first few days I was so amazed by these views, I forgot to take any long exposure shots of the sea. The day I started to do this, I immediately dropped almost all my expensive Neutral Density (ND) filters, used to slow down the shutter speed, over the Hamnoy bridge, limiting my capability severely. Later that day, in a series of mishaps, I lost all the rest of my filters, and very nearly lost the camera as well. Despite this, I ended up with some reasonable shots, almost entirely taken with the OM1’s inbuilt computational ND facility. Here are the best of them.




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In March of 2023 I went with the excellent Steve Bell and two other very amiable fellow photographers to the Lofoten Islands on the far North Western tip of Norway. This was a trip that had been planned for 2 years, and was designed to coincide with a forecasted peak in aurora activity.




The problem with photographing auroras is that a good aurora has to coincide with a clear night sky for any decent shots to be obtained. For the first 5 days of our 8 day stay we got either good weather or good aurora activity, but never both. However the vastly experienced Steve B was convinced our time would come, and indeed it did on the night of 23 March 2023. That night in Lofoten was one of the greatest aurora displays of the past decade, and certainly I never expect to see anything like it again. What I hadn’t expected was how fast things changed, as huge light displays across hundreds of kilometres of the night sky would suddenly appear, all around us, to be rapidly replaced by something else in a different direction.




I used my Olympus OM1 for all these shots, and it fulfilled its promise as an excellent night sky camera. Features like auto focus against night stars, and enhanced night vision were absolutely essential for quick selection and capturing of the best aurora displays. This was my first ever aurora night sky trip, and one of my first ever night sky sessions, so the camera really had to help me here, and it did. In terms of how these photos look, unlike static night sky shots like the Milky Way, where many shots are taken and combined to reduce the noise, aurora photographs are single shot images because the content moves so fast. I used On1 Photo Raw which is normal “non-astro” software. I set the colour balance to obtain a dark blue night sky background and enhanced large details in the aurora areas, and all the colours you see fall out of those settings. I took 300 keepers that night, and I present the best 30 or so here. I hope you like them.




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