An alley in Bangkok

A few weeks ago I published a post that talked about the new lease of life some of my older archived RAW images had received thanks to a combination of the new Lightroom 4 beta and Nik’s Color Efex 4. If you missed it, the post is called No Longer on the Scrapheap. Over the past weekend I had a bit of spare time so decided to go back to some even older images and see what it could do with them. When I first made the decision to switch to digital I did so by calculating the expected cost of buying and developing all the slide film I expected to use on a 15 day photo trip to Thailand that I was about to undertake. After crunching the numbers around I discovered that this would be about 60% the cost of a Canon 20D, it became a no-brainer to make the switch. My reasoning was that if I could effectively recoup 60% of the cost on a 2 week trip, I’d soon be shooting for free instead of paying every time I pressed the shutter button.

So a month after buying my first DSLR, I headed off to Thailand with the aim of getting out to the border with Cambodia to shoot the disputed temple, Khao Preah Vihear. I was also fortunate enough to discover the wonderful Khao Luang Caves while there which also yielded some work I was happy with. The two photographs that accompany this post however have sat on a harddrive in my archives since. Running them through Lightroom 4 and Nik Color Efex 4 has produced some results I’m quite pleased with.

As an aside, I’m preparing my spring newsletter now which will be released in the next week or so. Use the form below if you haven’t already signed up. If you not sure what you’re getting, take a look at the winter 2011 newsletter.

Phra Sumen Fort, Bangkok