Tang-ina! I can't believe i have a blog! BWAHAHAHA... (semi-maniacal laughter) I never thought i'd make one of these but i figured "what the hell" and dove right in...
Why make this? I kinda thought it'd be like the typical "share my pahtetic life with others with sorta equally pathetic lives" kind of thing but it hit me kinda wrong. It wasn't me. Not like i really know what "me" really is mind you...
So what the hell is this thing for? Pictures i think. Basically a repository of thumbnails that will be cross-linked to other pages. I'll try to show some of my photography work from back in the late 80's to the present.
Here's a history of photography as it went in my life... Grab some popcorn and a red bull. You'll need it.
I used to shoot an ancient Konica Acom-1 full-manual camera (except with an integrated light-meter) back in grade school. I remember taking picures of the rock garden in the Ateneo with kids jumping from rock to rock (which incidentally is what we called the activity) risking life and limb to see who could make the most daring jump. Then in high school, I "arbored" my dad's Canon EO-something camera. It was a flimsy thing but had a good lens. The f2.5-5.6 was pretty useful and it was a 'sorta' zoom with 28-55mm capabilities. I also got a 200-300mm telephoto from him and that was pretty useful... Never relly learned how to use the darn things much though... Technique and etc? WTF? I just wanna take pictures! I knew how to use a light meter of course but aperture adjustments? Depth of field? These words were babelfish-absent to me... (in a word, "duh"). I figured i'd eventually learn how to compose shots and be a "good photographer" in time.
Sadly, my sister dropped the EO-something one day when she borrowed it for a school thingy... Caused the shutter curtain to lock in place. The repair cost for the thing would've come out to about $150-200 so I didn't bother getting it fixed. I was forced to live with the Acom-1 and a flimsy little point-n-shoot Nikon (and it's name and model is irretrievably lost in the sands of time). I'm not saying the Acom-1 wasn't good. It was great honestly... Colors were well saturated and vivid without bleeding into another different hue. I had a wonderful macro lens that opened up to f1.3 and focused at less than 3-inches. I also had a telephoto that ranged from 80-240mm (Mike, where the hell is it?) and my normal lens was a 55mm f1.7-18 wonder from Konica. All in all, it was a pretty good 'pro' outfit. Problem was, I had no idea how to use it properly. I took great pictures with it though... I remember those days experimenting with Tri-X-Pan Kodak bw film... That was fun =) ... Just taking pictures like a mad shutterbug and waiting in anticipation of what would come out on the contact prints. It was a self inflicted suspense thriller since i had no idea what the results would be from the settings i made.
Flash photography was a nightmare! I'm sure some of you have had those icky black bands in the upper third of the frame when using a flash? Right? Please say yes... Anyway, i learned from a fellow shutterbug named Phil, that it was coz my flash was goin faster than my shutter. "So that's what the red line on the shutter speed dial is for!", I suddenly realize. I'm a photographic moron... sue me =P Anyway, after that embarassing incident i learned how to set the flash sorta correctly. I kept having really bright faces and no background at all but figured that's what the camera was capable of. No idea at all... heh...
That went on for a few years and eventually I got into a different kind of shooting, with guns this time. I joined the Ateneo Rifle and Pistol Team. This was still in high school by the way... I sorta neglected my camera then since practice took up lots of my time. I had a few 'models' though that would sometimes let me experiment with them as subjects. My old buddy Carvin, he was the club pres. at the time and a sorta neighbor. He'd do weird poses and etc if i asked nicely or bribed him with a bottle of Mt. Dew. There's Rash, another trigger-mate, she was actually the best in the country in the women's division at the time. No idea now though... She also had a few shots on film but were mostly shelved since I figured they weren't dramatic enough. Always smiling and such... heh... Shows what I knew then right? =) There's Marielle and Mike (married now) who were great candidates for candid pics since they were so wacky, especially Mike. Marielle was more of the thinker and had great introspective poses and profile shots. These were all great subjects and I learned immensely from the shots I took of these people.
Anyway, back to the narrative.
I stopped photography for a few years after that. Busy with trying to get into college and then college itself. Was still in the Ateneo. Was still a closet shutterbug (Designated family photographer). It wasn't until a year or so after that I joined a theater group, "Entablado" ("stage" in Filipino), that I rekindled the passion for capturing light. In that group, I met another of my best friends. Her name was Bing and she was the star of one of the plays a tagalized version of "Romeo and Juliet". She was a freshman then and I was a sophomore. We hit it off quite well and got to know each other pretty darn good in the following years. I thought of her as a kid sister or something... Really close but not 'that' close. From there, the arts became a passing interest to me and this had the weird effect of getting me to get my camera from it's long slumber in a cardboard box. The light meter was dead, batteries ran down. The flash's battery acid leaked into the housing and the camera was so dusty that you could plant potatos and expect a crop soon. I brought the darn thing to school one day and tried a few pictures. "Well the shutter works" I said to myyself. So I slapped in a roll of Kodak 36s and snapped away without the benefit of a meter or setting the damn ISO. Of course, the subject of choice was the Theater Group itself. The plays, the people and the sets. Veeeery educational! Bing was a favorite subject as well. I have a few shots of her sleeping and those were pretty cool.
It turns out that the film I got then was ISO200 and the camera was set too 100. This kinda overexposed some of the roll but it had great results! I got halo's around people, more vivid reds, greens and yellows, better definition in shadows and lots more. Anyways... as I said, I joined the theater group right? I heard that the faculty adviser, JoAvila, was going to have a summer course for basic photography. I was an arrogant bastard so I figured that I didn't need it. "I can take pictures! I'll show you the prints if you like?!?!?! " I took the class anyway... Well it turns out that his class was useful in the sense that I can use it as extra credit on my own marketing course for the advertising requirements. So I jumped on in and signed up.
Just before that summer, my parents went to Europe and the US on tour. While there, my dad bought a Nikon F55. When I spoke with him on the phone he told me about it and I said "can I have it?" He agreed and that was it. I had a 'new' camera. Once he got back, thankfully in time for the classes, I fiddled with the thing until I memorized every meñu on it. It had a Nikkor AF 35-80mm with F4 to 5.6 as the kit lens. At the time i had no idea what the hell that was and what those numbers meant.
So I attended the class and lo and behold! Definitions! I now knew what apertures, f-stops, DOF, exposure-compensation and whatnot were! WOW! I was a geek! --ahem-- Well sorta a geek... It was in every sense "basic photography". It was great to be honest... I learned more in those 6 weekends than in my previous 14 years fiddling with cameras. I spent more too! Damn film and printing were expensive! We had assignments to snap empty drink bottles, eggs, flowers, bugs, moving objects and etc. It was enlightening really. I had a great camera with a good lens so I had no trouble with the settings. (a classmate bought an F5 with a 28-200 2.8 for the class, rich bastard..) But I'm proud to say, I got my fair share of the weekly 'awards' that the prof gave out.
After that stint, I joined the school paper "The Guidon" as a staff photographer. I was in the sports section most of the time since I was a noob. So there I went to different games and sports events where the school participated. I got to pratice my panning skillz and fast action type sequences with this stuff so it wasn't too bad. The best thing about that time? The darkroom. An old buddy of mine, Orven, was the godfather of the photo staff on the paper. He controlled the darkroom. I saw him exit the cubbyhole beside the women's lavatory one day and wondered out loud "what the #^(& is in there?" Well he answered by dragging me into it. It stank by golly... It was like vinegar, eggs and sex rolled into a physically palpable miasma. The vinegar like smell is of course the acetic acid used for processing the film, the eggs were probably Orven's breakfast and the sex... well, yes, some people did kinky shit in that room!
For the next few days Id help the big guy develop and print the stuff for the school paper. I was learning and learning quick. I learned what chemicals to use for whatever process, how to mix em in hot water without overcooking the solution, how to work in the dark without spilling acid all over myself and lots more! Eventually I was given the keys to the darkroom and allowed to play havoc with the materials therein. So i took advantage of that and tried my own methods and developed 'new' techniques. Well.. they were new to me at least...
I tried overburning, multiple shots on one paper, slide prints, recopying negatives and etc. It was fun! The most fun I've had in photography since... i started. I installed an old car radio and speakers in the darkroom and turned it into my own personal refuge from the rigors of school. I stuck a small stove in there to cook the mixtures as well as heat water for my morning coffee... One of the teachers just about freaked when she saw me drinking black smoking stuff from a beaker. Nothing beats the smell of photo-checmicals, niccotine and caffeine in the morning! Kudos to the Colayco Coffee Club for those good ole days. (Balsy, Alexie, Maricris, Naz, Gen, Dots, Donna, Shirley and etc... you know what I mean...). Wasted more film than any other point in my life during that period. Some from the school's film supplies but most from my own big-ass roll of newsreel quality kodak B&W iso 200...
Oh... I also got a piece of crap Sony Mavica that writes to floppy disks as my first foray into the digital realm of photography near my last year in shool. You remember those slow-ass things? They were awful! Terrible white balance, laughable battery life, shutter-lag that you can measure in seasons and the damn thing was huge, bigger than my F55 even...
Well I got the thing for my layout projects and photoshop learning. It was useful in that sense since all PCs at the time had a floppy drive and the pictures at 800x600 were manageable by the weakest PC around. So i used that for a while along with my F55 for my sidelines and extra cash. It supported me pretty well in those days where money was at a premium. I think the mavica is here somewhere with a dead batt... (update, i managed to hardwire an old R/C battery onto the mavica so it didn't cost me $90 to get a new batt from sony. Cost me a wire splinter in my index finger and a small burn too from soldering the wires on the thing though...But it works!) The mavica paid for itself eventually with the photo and layout jobs I was assigned and it worked out great until I lent it to my Mom for a few weeks since she wanted to take pictures of flowers and etc... I "borrowed" it back one day and found that the batt had died somehow. What were the odds? I lent it to her for 2 lousy weeks and that's when the batt dies...
Anyways, I graduated and moved on to different things since then. I worked for an IT reseller in the marketing department. I was in the events group but eventually got rodeoed into being the company photographer for the annual product guides and ads that we released. I got a few photo lights 2nd-hand and really cheap, a flash for my nikon, a sturdy tripod and snapped away. The fun part was that the company covered all my costs! So I snapped away without a care in the world. They also let me use a Canon Ixus digital camera, top of the line at the time with 3MP so that helped with my learning digicams and etc as well as learning photoshop and pagemaker all over again.
Well after that phase, I moved to a call center where I still am now. Was shuffled from role-to-role but most recently handled the new guys who came in and as an escalation manager (for pissed off customers who wanted to talk to "someone else"). It wasn't a bad job but it had it's bad moments... That's a footnote in my personal history but has nothing at all to do with photography, that came a few months after...
I was in the office walking around and I saw this girl lugging around a huge Nikon one day. Turns out she was the "training department head" and she was taking pictures of some people in her little clique (the training dept). So I said "cool, nice camera" to myself and looked for my buddy Karlo (we'll get to him in a bit). I had to do a double take on the camera though as I noticed she was looking at an LCD on the back panel. "WTF?" The damn thing was digital! I asked to see it and she grudgingly handed it over. It was a D1H. Wow... i've never seen a digital SLR before that and I was impressed! Sure the thing was clunky and huge and heavy but it meshed two of my seven favorite things in the world! Those being techy gadgets and cameras.
The other five being my iPaq, Christine (my car, named after the crazy car in the Stephen King book), my Nikon f55, my computer/s (custom monstrosity that i've built and upgraded over 6years) and my Nokia 6600 (crappy 640x480 camera, scratches, cracks and all).
So that's when I was bitten by the 'real' digital bug. My foray into Sony's Mavica wasn't an expression of creativity but a learning experience and money-making opportunity. From that moment, I started researching techniques, specs, brands, prices and the whole gamut of Photography info that I could coerce out of the world wide web. The more useful links would be http://www.kenrockwell.com/, http://www.dpreview.com/, http://www.nikonians.org/, www.bythom.com and the local forums. These sites gave me an idea of what I should buy and why i should get it. So after a few months of painstaking reasearch, I finally had enough cash to get my newest baby. I trekked on down to quiapo, went into Mang Ramon's shop (Mayer) and ordered a D70s kit. Paid cash, left, got drenched in a midsummer monsoon, went to Megamall to get a CF card and went straight home and read the manual.
Excited me thinks?
What followed was an excercise in wanton photographic abandon! Without the limitations of cost vs. film and processing, I just snapped away at anything I pleased! took about 400+ pictures the first week and refined my techniques too. With digital you can at least see the results of your labours immediately after taking the shot and it wouldn't cost you a cent to do that. Pretty useful for the beginning photographer.
So here I am now. I've gotten several additional accesories for my kit. Namely a Nikkor 70-210 push-pull lens, a Nikkor 50mm 1.8 and an SB-600 Speedlight. With this equip and a little ingenuity, I have all I need for a mini-studio at home and travel shots.. I aslo got a Sigma 10-20mm ultr wide but returned it due to focus issues... but hopefully, I can find a replacement soon enough. Maybe a Tokina 12-24mm...
I'll be psoting pics and etc here sporadically since I'm not really a 'blogger' by heart. I prefer to be out there taking pictures but I figure I'll let the world in on this one piece of myself for a change... Enjoy your voyouristic self as you look through my eyes... ;)
