Why You Go There?

The Long Thanh Gallery is definitely a highlight on the Nha Trang trip!!! His black and white photography is spectacular and he has won all the awards to attest to his talent… He truly captures the spirit of Vietnam!! http://longthanhart.com

My favorite part of the War Remnants Museum was the photo journalist exhibit by photographers and journalists killed in the conflict… Amazing… This camera was donated by a Japanese photographer who chronicled the war - Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Vietnam (at War Remnants Museum (Bảo Tàng Chứng Tích Chiến Tranh))

The Angkor Wat Temple at Dawn (photograph taken with iPhone4 and edited with PS Express) Siem Reap, Cambodia

The largest Hindu temple complex in the world (now Buddhist) built in the 12th century, Angkor Wat is almost 1,000 years old! It is amazing to see, but there are hundreds of other temples in Angkor and around Siem Reap that are spectacular to explore due to their age, intricacy, and battle with the surrounding jungle!!

Angkor Wat itself is difficult to enjoy because of the hoards of tourists (many of them are Chinese and Korean) that make it impossible to take in the intricate details that make the temple so incredible and even harder to capture a good photograph.

05:00AM at the temple was no different. Every travel photographer knows about the Angkor Wat “sunrise” where you can capture magnificent skies as a background to the temple while getting a crystal clear reflection of this dramatic landscape in the foreground. Capturing the sunrise at Angkor Wat is something I have wanted to do since first reading about the experience in a travel magazine and seeing the imagery more decade ago.

What I didn’t realize is that the “Angkor Wat Sunrise” is now a well known event for all travelers to Siem Reap even if they aren’t fine art or travel photographers! I assumed that only avid, diehard photographers would wake at 4AM in the morning and arrange transportation to the temple to be setup for the sunrise. First of all, you never know if a sunrise or sunset are going to be colorful or good until they happen… Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. Secondly, it is somewhat technical and difficult to capture low-light and long-exposure photographs at dawn. It definitely requires a good camera and lugging around a tripod. However, the sunrise at Angkor Wat appears to have become a quintessential travel experience for thousands of tourists and not just photographers!

We were lucky to have beaten the crowds to the edge of the lilly pond I scoped out the day before primarily because our tuk-tuk driver knows the back roads and took us to a park entrance with no ticket lines (you need a temple pass to visit Angkor and any of the temples around Siem Reap). We still approached the temple surrounded by tourists and I was nervous that the spot where I wanted to setup my tripod and camera would already be taken, but there were only a few other people at the pond when we arrived there. This seemed to change in a matter of minutes!

By 05:20AM there were hundreds of tourists lining the pond and only a few “real” photographers in the crowd (I know this because there were flashes going off everywhere with only darkness and a faint glow in the sky). By the time the glow of dawn was breaching the horizon there were probably a thousand people at the temple and half of these tourists wanted a coveted spot on the pond’s edge (the pond is quite small even in the wet season). When I told the owner of our guesthouse about the crowds he wasn’t surprised and said it is common for fights to breakout amongst the crowds at sunrise… It’s a temple for christ’s sake!!

When we initially arrived the scene was surreal with the crescent moon, the stars, and the silhouette of the iconic temple. You could see the outline of the entire Milky Way because it is so dark here at night and void of light pollution! This serene scene only lasted around 15min for us but it was truly amazing. The actual sunrise at Angkor Wat is impossible to enjoy unless you sit back far away from the temple and forget about photography completely! At the pond’s edge there are loud tourists and a lot of bumping. The entire shore of the pond was surrounded and was 10people deep all the way around. Some tourists were even playing music. Most people hadn’t had their coffee and weren’t all that friendly.

I feel like I captured some amazing photos (I’m quite anxious to get the 35mm slides developed!), but the experience was annoying and it wasn’t all that enjoyable. The digital image above may or may not be an indication to how my 35mm film turns out, but it doesn’t show the hoards of tourists pushing against my back, the shouting, and the complete lack of respect for fellow travelers or for Buddhist and Hindu customs. There certainly wasn’t anything sacred about this sunrise regardless of how the scene looks in my photographs!!

Usually when I post a photograph it’s to share a great experience, but here I’m sharing a good photograph of what I felt like was a mediocre and disappointing travel experience. If you go see the sunrise at Angkor Wat with the right expectations then you can mitigate your disappointment, but I went with the illusion that I would only be sharing the sunrise with a handful of special travelers… Luckily the sunrise was spectacular in colors, I think I got some sweet shots, and we rapidly escaped to the east side of the temple where there weren’t any people…

Travel the World in 35mm Photographs at www.rEyShaunMadolora.com (Taken with Instagram)

The new website is live!!! Check it out!!!

(although in “beta” version as we continue to optimize the experience for speed and on mobile devices… HTML5!! Interactive map!! 1,000+ 35mm Photographs!!!)

el rEy is coming!!!!

The new website is set to launch next week with hundreds of never before seen 35mm photographs and an interactive map… The site was developed using HTML5 so that it will work on mobile devices like the iPad or iPhone (or whatever tablet you prefer)… it has been a huge project but will be worth all the hard work to be able to share my photography with the world!!!

Hidden Beach - Bacuit Archipelago - El Nido - Palawan, Philippines - 2012*

*35mm Transparency Photograph - I got lucky and was able to find a photography lab in South Korea that could develop the rolls of 35mm film I have shot during the past 5months of traveling. It was no easy task, but a contact I follow on Instagram that is based in Seoul posted some of her film work and when I saw it I asked her for help. She was able to translate the technical terms I needed into Hangul which enabled me to communicate with a lab technician enough to work out shipping the film to Seoul (from Busan) with instructions to “push process”. I was nervous that something could get lost in translation as I have had rolls of film processed wrong in the US with no language barrier, but the slides came back flawless and it was easy to get them scanned… This is one of the highlights!