Local photographer seeing the Kingdom in a new light

Phnom Penh Post Hacking a digital camera so it records inivisible light is not the usual approach to making pictures – but Meoun Nhean is not your usual photographer

Angkor Wat has been photographed from every conceivable angle and light from sunup to sundown. It hosts millions of tourists a year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a visitor who isn’t trying to capture its beauty through his own lens.

So snapping a truly unique picture of the temple seems like an impossibility.But it’s a challenge he thrives on.

Finding new ways of capturing Cambodia’s picturesque places is Moeun Nhean’s artistic passion, and his recent work – which uses a digital camera to record light waves that are invisible to the human eye – shows the Kingdom’s most recognisable locale from a different perspective.

In a photo of the entrance to the Bayon temple in Siem Riep, the statues lining the road look normal, but are shaded by bright white trees that appear to be covered with snow. In a photo of Angkor Wat, the temple looks purple, the sky looks green, and the trees reflect the same ghostly white. These images have not been digitally manipulated on a computer, but produced in-camera.

Although Moeun Nhean’s photos are taken with digital cameras, infrared photography, and the ethereal effect it creates, has been practised since the early 1900s.

In infrared photography, the film or sensor is made sensitive to infrared light – light which is invisible to the human eye. Red or almost opaque filters are then used to allow infrared light through while blocking some or all of the visible light.

The fluorescent look of foliage created with this process is called the “Wood effect”, after Robert W Wood, who pioneered infrared photography.