Living Under Imagination

I rarely do heavy post-processing on my work. All I usually do when I get my photos from my camera to the computer is convert them from RAW and do a little bit of curve adjustments and white balance tweaking, and that’s it! Take for example the picture on the left. From the camera, the photo is already how I would want it to be. I wouldn’t call myself a purist, but I’ve been called that a couple of times.

Back in the days of film, when I was still learning, I didn’t have my own darkroom. So whatever post-processing the lab was capable of, such as color adjustment and push-processing, was applied to the whole shot. No dodging, no burning, no enhancing features and cloning out flaws. When I do my RAW conversion, that’s basically what I do as well–curves for color adjustments, white balance, and exposure adjustments (kinda like push-processing).

Check out the rest of the photos in our Facebook Page!

More on the gun shoot after the jump.

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I saw this photo while I was browsing YowaYowa’s blog.

It reminded me of a shoot we did a couple of years ago in Sagami Ono, and made me think could this be on the same line of tracks we shot on or if it was in a completely different part of Japan? It looks quite similar, but then again there are miles and miles of tracks in Japan, and a lot of places where houses are just beside those tracks, with similar looking rocks!

Compare for yourself YowaYowa’s picture:

With this photo from the Project Victory shoot:

Makes you wonder…

I apologize for the incredibly long delay. But without further ado, the conclusion…

After our mini food-trip around Laoag, we were now back in Balay de Blas. Some of us chose to rest, while playing Monster Hunter, and some of us wanted to…uhm…relieve ourselves. I had gone first, and partly due to the poor ventilation of the CR, partly due to the intensity of my power, it took Rhoy, who was next in line, a few minutes before he could acquire an immunity to it. It was very unfortunate to Rommel, the third person in line though.

After our little rest, we went out to find a great place to cap off our whole trip. And we went to one of the best places there is in Laoag. We had sinanglao, some insrabasab, and a few more dishes that I can’t now remember. For dessert, our resident cheesecake aficionado, Leon, decided he wanted to treat us all for cakes. He bought three kinds for us to share. The carrot cake was delicious. Sadly, it was the blueberry cheesecake that fell to last place. It’s not that it wasn’t good, but it was just mediocre.

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So it’s been two weeks since we came back from our trip, and this post on the last leg of our Northern Exposure trip has just now been written and posted. Man, it’s really different when you’re out there, without a care in the world blogging at night as you wind down your day of swimming, travelling, taking pictures, and having fun, and the only reason you need to get up early is because you want to catch the sunrise or you have a bus trip to the next exciting destination!

Now who wouldn’t want a life like that?!
(If you want that life, contact me and let’s figure out how to get there)

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This one took a bit of time to write. Actually, it’s starting to write that was the hardest.

We had so many places to see, so many things to do, so many laps to swim, and so many food to eat that I just found myself happily exhausted.

We arrived in Pagudpud, the third leg of our Northern Exposure trip, two days ago. We left Vigan at around 9:00am on a bus to Laoag, then transferred to a St. Joseph bus to Pagudpud. At 1:30pm, we got off the town plaza of Pagudpud, surprised by the number of people that had gathered.

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Jeff: Walking away quietly... Tiger: Pretending I don't notice...

Been quite busy having a vacation. Just a quick post on the tigers in Baluarte and the old belltower in Vigan yesterday.

We’re in Pagudpud right now in Hannah’s Beach Resort (miss you, Hannah) enjoying the breathtaking scenery.

So, in the meantime, here are some more pics from our great adventure.

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Right now, we’re having lunch (some of us, me included, halo-halo) at Mang’s again. A while ago, we were at Baluarte. We had empanada again, and I had papaitan as well. Ever since we got to Vigan, the second destination of our trip, we have been almost nothing but eating. Then we’d take a break and see some sights, then we’ll eat again. Such a yummy place.

We woke up really early yesterday at about 4 in the morning; our tricycle drivers were gonna pick us up from Kylah Transient House at 5:30 so we could get on the 6 o’ clock Victory Liner bus to Dagupan (P61). While we were waiting for the tricycles, a bread man went by and we called him. He sold pan de sal, the nostalgic kind where you can still taste its freshly baked goodness. We arrived at Dagupan after about an hour and a half where we stayed for a few minutes so that Rhoy could recover from motion sickness. From Dagupan, we changed buses to go to Agoo (P47) which took us another hour. The Agoo basilica was just about a block away from where we got off.

From there, we waved down a bus that was going to Vigan. The bus was terribly slow, with frequent stops waiting for passengers. I estimate that the trip from Agoo to Vigan is around 4-6 hrs. It took us 7.

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We’re currently in Alaminos, the first stop in our trip. The bus ride (P352 incl. insurance) was shorter than expected. We left the Cubao terminal of Victory Liner at 9:00PM. By 1:30AM, we were already at the Alaminos terminal. I’m not sure if it was because it was the middle of the night, or if we heard incorrectly, but the tricycle drivers initially asked for P100 head! We got it down to P80/tricycle. There were six of us so we had to take 2 tricycles. It should’ve been just a 10 minute ride to Lucap, but we couldn’t find the Kylah Transient Inn. Someone was actually waiting, and flagged down our tricycles, but he said “MK”, the former name of KTI so we went past. A few more minutes riding in the biting cold morning and we met 2 guys on a motorcycle who offered to lead us to our place.

After having Alaminos longganisa (around P65 with rice) for breakfast at the market, the first island we went to was Governor’s Island.

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Aübergine Booth at the Global Pinoy Bazaar (photo courtesy of Aübergine)

Graffiti Wall Group Shot

Two weekends ago, Aübergine was at the Rockwell Global Pinoy Bazaar. Initially, I thought the bazaar was going to be composed of a few stalls, like one of those Saturday morning markets, and not the whole 750 square meters of the Rockwell Tent. I haven’t been there sand unfortunately, I wasn’t there during the bazaar because I had to be in Singapore for training.

A big congratulations to the girls of Aubergine for the launch of their clothing line and their brand new website!

Read on to see the video and pictures of the shoot. (more…)

I had the honor of working with Aübergine a couple of weeks ago. They were a really, friendly, dynamic, young group of designers and we got along pretty well. It was great shooting the models modelling the fashion line. And we all had a blast doing the shoot.

So I’d like to invite you all to come see the collaborative work of these 6 young fashion designers as they showcase their fashion line. It will be at the Global Pinoy Bazaar at the Rockwell Tent on November 14 & 15.

I’ll be posting more on this after the event and also once their website launches. In the meantime, you can add them up on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Aubergine/195880131210