Bonifacio Day, Quiapo Manila

NOSTALGIA: Streets of San Francisco

These are literally off the wall crude reproductions of a series of images of San Francisco. In 1988, at the height of my photojournalism career and right after the mythical Edsa uprising of 1986, my image gathering screeched to a stop. It seemed a momentary disturbance in time and space affected me
Almost a decade had blurred past me after I engaged myself into this calling and somehow it emptied me out. Taking a forced sabbathical from the frenzy, I dived deep into another medium which will eventually take me to San Francisco in the Bay Area. I trained hard to be a key animator back in Manila with the Hanna-Barbera subsidiary, Fil-Cartoons and not long ....after another flurry of events, I got the chance to direct the characteranimation of my favorite characters, "The Simpsons" and "Felix The Cat" for interactive CDROM's for the Mac and windows platforms.
It was real fun and a good opportunity to study...it was a gift to be inthe Multimedia Gulch during the early years of multimedia and the Internet because at a certain point, my passion for photography was reignited by an old friend who was a resident artist of San Francisco. With his grant, I lectured about experiential photography at the SOMA .
I woke up one day with the decision that it was time to buy my first brand new Leica and a normal lens which I took to the streets producing the following images..

Castro District, San francisco-1996

South of Market, San Francisco 1995

Haight Ashbury Area,San Francisco

Union Square, San Francisco

San Francisco 1995

Castro, San francisco

kids at the chartcoal bins at Vitas

Pier 18 dumpsite

Smoggy... that's how it is day or night viewed from afar.

Pushing the lens

Children play at a garbage transferring utility. I have been having fun shooting against the light lately...like I said, Iam just reeling from a mishap that almost wrecked all my gear. Now I am trying out if the contrast and sharpness of my lenses are still there. As you know,shooting extrenely backlit situations with a bright light source like the sun pushes the envelope of a lens' and drive it's elements to do weird things.

C5_cityscape

Payatas today

Children in Conflict Situations

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Whew!! That was a close one

Halleluia! after almost two weeks at the Canon Service center, My 70-200 lives!!! photo: Akira

Tis' me

A funny but sad thing happened yesterday on my way to the...

A very funny thing happened to me yesterday on my way out of a press event..... Funny bcoz It gave me flashbacks into my life as a key animator doing cartoon slapsticks for the network cartoon shows in the U.S. and elsewhere. I know a lot of you have seen scenes where a character flies over a cliff running and momentarily floating in midair with feet still in running cycles until he realizes that there is nowhere else to go but down.
The same thing happened to me yesterday. ...It was the Miss Earth media presscon and although i didn't really planned on covering it, I found myself entering the poolside where dozens of Photographers, hobbyists, the new breed of citizen journalists and of course... voyeurs. In a little whilem before the presentation even started I walked out of the cordone... in the direction of an old friend I have seldom seen. ....The next hing I knew was that in the bottom corner of my eye , I thought I saw a flash of blue! And the next instant I realizedI was right.... I walked straight into the other pool . Too late!!! OOOPS!!

Cut to me walking underwater with all of my gear. 2 digital cameras, with a wide and a telephoto lens,my Domke bag filled with all kinds of gadgets...I made a big splash and when I got pulled out of the water.....My mind was already in a dreamy state...everything was a blur...I was rallied into the poolside shower room with some of my close friends attending to what I might need to perform First Aid on my dripping equipment. The lifeguard and pool attendants gave me bundles of dry towels and a huge roll of toilet paper to dry up my gear. I spent the next two hours giving CPR to my cameras, lenses, hard drives, flash, etc... when I finally came out of the shower, the realization that all of my hard-earned equipment was wiped-out sank in.... With the help of good friend and fellow photographer Danny Tan, I hurried home. Sad, very sad.......I was not about to give up. The moment I was home, I laid down every single piece of equipment I have on the bed and started the tedious process of resuscitating my cameras. All the while , I was meditating and praying to God to touch my cameras and heal it. Though it was impossible for my two Canon DSLR's to come out of the ordeal alive......... IT DID survive in the end .The next morning the circuits and functions if my cameras started working one by one . The lenses did not however came out unscathed ....The doctors at the service center will do their stuff on it.Whew!!! LONG LIVE PHOTOJOURNALISM...It ain't dead yet...not for me!
One more thing.... The "Otter Box" PDA shell I bought as an investment for my IPAQ pocketPC
paid off!! It proved its worth at USD 99.00....it's waterproof, shock-resistant and crushproof. Nobody should leave home without it.

Shangrila Mall

Testing my ruined lens in monochrome mode

lrt1