Shooting Phnom Penh - The Muslim quarter

Its the second day of our Christmas 2012 expedition around Phnom Penh, spent this time exploring around the Muslim quarter , a district I have visited before only once before a few years ago.  All images below shot on Leica M9P with Leica glass ranging from 24mm to 75mm.

In true Cambodia fashion, everybody was chatting away with us and smiling.  We even saw one fish seller start slapping her friend with some raw fish and prompting Steve to shoot the comedy!

I did my usual trick of wandering off alone from our group (I always find it easier to shoot alone, rather than with other photographers,  I find it much less intimidating for my subjects if I am by myself.  I quickly found some interesting alleyways and residents that invited me into their homes and workplaces to see what they were up to.

One family took me into some dark back room where they had a 20ft python coiled up in the corner....i almost left my camera bag where it was and ran off! lol.

For some reason I am highly attracted at the moment to shooting people in hijabs, i find the m really interesting and the way they frame womens faces makes for lovely images, and I was delighted to find lots of kids and women wearing them around this part of town, not typically something you would expect to find in Cambodia I guess, but like most other cities in the world, theres a little bit of everything, you just need to know where to look.

And last but not least of course is my good friend Stephen Patterson, I couldn't resist a portrait of him with the great light as he was scouring the landscape for his next subjects from the back of the tuk tuk on our way back to town.

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