Angkor temples

Finally I have got round to processing and uploading photos from Angkor Wat.  First tranche is from the smaller temples around Angkor Wat itself.  You should be able to see why I preferred these quiet and incredibly atmospheric places to the main attraction.

Long delay for these snaps.  The wait has been mainly due to starting with new photo processing software.  I have been using Adobe Lightroom for a few years, on a very powerful quad-core laptop.  With the advent of the Transformer  tablet, I also downsized to a smaller, more portable laptop.  It’s still a full twin-core system, not a netbook, but Lightroom is unusable on it (incredibly slow to export pictures).   In fact I have been finding Lightroom pretty unusable anyway – far to slow to load photographs,  and to save them, and on looking on forums have noticed this is a problem for many users.

Looking around for faster software for raw files, I came across Sagelight.  Long story short – this is amazing software, fast, light, and extremely powerful.  I’ve been experimenting and learning with it, and then working on the raw snaps from the Sony Nex-5, that I used at Angkor.  Work in progress, at the moment.  I’ll be likely reworking the photo’s and adding more, but here are the first 8.  And some time soon I’ll do a post on the software itself.

A word or two about Angkor itself.  There are thousands of temples in the area, most around 1000 years old, from a lost civilization.  Angkor Wat is the famous one, but it also gets a phenomenal amount of tourist traffic.  M*rk, who very kindly was my guide, knows the area very well, and used an excellent strategy of hitting the smaller temples early, before getting to Angkor Wat later, after the masses had moved on.  As a result we wondered round incredibly atmospheric smaller temples almost alone, and were not overwhelmed by tourists even when we hit the big one.

I have to say, that it was the smaller temples that really caught my imagination.  Angkor Wat itself is huge, but possible over-restored, less ornate than the smaller ones, and less mysterious.   Hopefully you will see for yourselves from these snaps why I think that.  I’ll be adding more photos over time, including from AKW itself, so keep checking.  As before, info about the pics can be found by clicking the little ‘i’ button in the top right of the photo box before, and the snaps are best seen in full screen, by pressing the button at the bottom right (esc to get out of full screen)