THE BAYON TEMPLE

The Bayon temple is one of the most famous temples in Cambodia to have survived from the era of the Angkorian Empire. It was built at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, and its fame is overshadowed perhaps only by the enormous Angkor Wat. The temple was created during the reign of Jayavarman VII and in its day was the central temple of the capital, Angkor Thom. The temple follows the type of pyramid-shaped temples symbolising the sacred Hindu mountain Meru. It differs from the other temples above all in its number of towers, of which there were reportedly as many as 49. Most of them are adorned with the image of a face, facing all four cardinal directions. It is usually assumed that the face depicts the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, but there are also debates that it represents the ruler Jayavarman VII himself.

The Bayon temple was the first one I visited in Cambodia. The moment you step through the gate into the inner part of the temple, the gazes of all those stone faces fix upon you, and they are literally everywhere around. No matter where you look, stone eyes are always watching you. Sometimes it sent shivers down my spine. The temple is fairly large, so you'll need plenty of time to explore it thoroughly. Of course, I spent quite a long while photographing the beautiful towers, but then I escaped the tourists and slipped into the temple's inner sections.

There a surprise awaited me. Beautiful corridors, high vaulted stone ceilings, and rows of columns. You literally can't grasp how, back in the 12th century, people could carry out such demanding building techniques in the middle of the jungle. And when you pause for a moment and picture how many people lived here, and that the temple stands at the very heart of the whole city of Angkor Thom, where probably only the ruler and other chosen ones once moved about, the power of the place weighs on you even more.

The photographs of the corridors, which are ultimately probably my favourites from this place, were often created by stitching several shots together. I didn't have a wide-angle lens with me that was wide enough to capture an entire corridor, so I had to improvise. These are genuinely difficult conditions to shoot in. The interior of the corridors is very dark, and from outside, at times, really harsh light breaks through to you. The ideal thing would be to shoot HDR photos from a tripod. That already requires a bit of practice and, above all, that tripod :) Filming in places like this is even trickier. Often only a quality camera with a sufficiently wide dynamic range on the sensor will help (good thing I brought my BMPCC). So be prepared, so that conditions this tricky don't catch you off guard.

Tip 1: Don't have a tripod with you and want to take an HDR shot? Set up exposure bracketing (I use -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 - though -2, 0, +2 would be enough, but the Nikon D800 doesn't have that option), set the fastest possible continuous shooting (in my case 4fps) and a base shutter speed of at least 1/200. In the case of a dark corridor this will also call for ISO 400 or ISO 800. Then brace yourself firmly and fire off 5 photos in one burst. Repeat the whole process three times. This is my trick for handling HDR even when I don't have a tripod on hand. Sometimes, of course, it doesn't work out, because you can't hold the camera steady enough, but often one of the three attempts turns out well. I then merge the HDR in CameraRAW (because I can still save the resulting HDR photo as RAW), and that often copes with slight camera movement.

Tip 2: Again, as with Angkor Wat, I recommend not starting your morning with the Bayon temple (unless, that is, you can manage to be here really early). A small loop between the temples starts here, so a huge mass of tourists begins with the Bayon. I think there'll be more peace and quiet in the late afternoon or at least in the afternoon hours. Simply choose your route differently, or the opposite way round to everyone else.

Gear: In places like this you'll really appreciate a tripod, but not only that - if you can carry it, bring a panoramic head too, with a suitable lens on it (say 18 mm and 35 mm), and you'll be able to shoot every situation. That means creating HDR shots, but also panoramic frames in spots where even your widest lens is no longer enough.