Beng Mealea

[Manfred M]

Back in 2009, my main camera was the Panasonic FX9, a point & shoot that shot only jpegs.

I had it with me when we visited Beng Mealea, a temple in Cambodia some 40km / 25mi away from its more famous "brother", Angkor Wat. While smaller in scale, the designs of the two temples were virtually identical. Because it is out of the way, it receives far fewer visitors and has not been "rescued" from the jungle. It is still very much overgrown.

As an area where the Khymer Rouge held out towards the end of the Cambodia civil war, the area was heavily mined and the de-mining effort was still going on in the areas around the temple.

Compositionally interesting and it stretched the poor little point & shoot to the limit, but I still like the image with its more recent (today) reworking in Photoshop.




That was the last trip for the FX-9. I picked up a Nikon D90 a few weeks after returning from this trip.

Okay - two reworks of the image based on the comments from John and Philip. I've really added a lot of blue back into the image to tone down the greens (perhaps a bit too much?) The moss and lichens were everywhere. I've added a slight Gaussian blur to take off some of the sharpening impact as well.




I've also done a basic B&W image too.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured, the P & Ss can usually do a good job but like you I felt the need to upgrade and went with the D60 for my first DSLR.

[just me]

Hi Manfred.....love the image, and you did a very good job with the Panasonic FX9.......lucky that you did not step on a mine .......

Griddi.......

[IzzieK]

This is an interesting shot...Are those two men working the mine or just sticky beaking? Better to see this in an expanding form in Lytebox..

[Manfred M]

This is an interesting shot...Are those two men working the mine or just sticky beaking? Better to see this in an expanding form in Lytebox..

They are just other tourists visiting the site.

[bnnrcn]

I think I will buy a P&S camera to carry always with me after seeing some images in this website. Very nice image Manfred

[John 2]

A difficult composition, well handled Manfred. Interesting place as well. Perhaps a tad over sharpened?

[Manfred M]

A difficult composition, well handled Manfred. Interesting place as well. Perhaps a tad over sharpened?

Possibly John. I followed the same process as I usually do in sharpening, i.e. applying the unsharp mask filter when viewing the image at 100% size on my 27" screen. I tweak the parameters manually to get the look that I am after. Being a cheap camera / lens I did sharpen a tad more than I do with my regular lenses and also had to manually remove the spherochromatism (magenta and green fringes in out of focus areas).

Under those conditions, it does not look oversharp from where I sit. I went back to the original, reprocessed the image and found that the parameters I used in the original post still seem to work well. The problem with sharpening is one that is similar to colour correction; one can't tell what the other person is seeing due to equipment / calibration / etc. conditions.

[MrB]

It is a good composition of an interesting scene, Manfred. The processing has resulted in a just bit too much contrast and saturation (particularly yellow and some of the green) for my taste though.

Cheers.
Philip

[Donald]

Are those two men ...

Took me ages to find them!

Good work with P & S. Fascinating subject.

[Manfred M]

It is a good composition of an interesting scene, Manfred. The processing has resulted in a just bit too much contrast and saturation (particularly yellow and some of the green) for my taste though.

Cheers.
Philip

Thanks for the thought Philip - this was a tough call in PP work.

The whole structure was very much under the forest canopy and the stones were covered with moss / lichen, so I want that to show through. I'm going to dial up the blue to see what that does to the image.

[Mike Buckley]

Wonderful composition!

I'm surprised that using Gaussian blur to deal with the baked-in sharpening worked as well as it did. I gave up years ago trying that solution because I never found it to be as effective as in your solution. I wonder if the technology of Gaussian blur has improved in the many years since I last tried using it for this purpose..

I wish I had heard of this place when I was at Angkor. If I ever return, I'll be sure to visit it. It has the look of Angkor's Ta Prohm, which is in the area that the archaeologists intentionally only partially removed the forest growth from the buildings.

[Manfred M]

Mike - I used a 0.2 pixel blur. Just enough to take the edge of things. It usually works, but not always.

The Ta Prohm area is a walk in the park when compared to this place. Beng Mealea was totally overgrown and probably what the whole Angkor Thom area looked like before it was "rediscovered" by Westerners. The other temple we had hoped to visit was Preah Vihear on the Thai / Cambodian border, but were advised against it as sovereignty was in dispute and the Thai and Cambodian armies exchanged fire in the area. I understand things have calmed down now, so if we get back to that part ot the world it will be on the "to do" list as well.

[Rider in the Sky]

Back in 2009, my main camera was the Panasonic FX9, a point & shoot that shot only jpegs.

I've also done a basic B&W image too.

This is best.