The Year That Was — 2008 in Pictures

The year 2008 has been a fruitful ride for me. I finally left my first job where I worked for almost 5 years and moved to the country’s business capital. I’ve gained a lot more white hairs and a handful of wisdom. Some old habits gone and replaced with new ones. Read a new set of books and put me to a new perspective to many things. Some so-so friends gone but there are those who really stick around.

But most importantly, I’ve gotten a better and clearer understanding of digital and photography combined. My gear has gotten a year old and a half, and it has been the primary instrument for the year long learning experience.

In celebration, allow me to share the past year in pictures below.

Rule of thirds. I have a knack for taking pictures of inanimate objects, white spaces, simple things, and the color brown. Combining the shadows and stillness of this chair, I shot and applied the rule. It’s a picture compelling enough to tell a thousand stories.

If I could make traveling as a living, I don’t have an idea where I would be right now. This is the entrance to the future wonder of the world— The Underground River of Palawan. It’s a river underneath a mountain where various formation of limestones  and unknown depth. Its difficult shooting pictures inside especially as a Filipino tourist riding alongside foreigners from Malta, Australia, Japan and US. I had to snatch a perfect shot in a perfect timing under a cave lit only by the flashes of camera and that of the boatman’s flashlight. It was a great experience riding in that boat.

Most of the pictures I’ve taken where I paused think and composed heavily are landscapes. This is one of them where I started to appreciate the result of my learning on how to take a good if not great landscapes.

Birds. They used to wake me up in the morning during my stay in Sta. Rosa, Laguna. Manually focused with a pre-AI 200mm lens, I snapped this photo on one of those mornings.

Don’t you just love cats? This is probably one of the sharpest photographs I have.

Old and New. A portrait of my grandma and a kin.

I started 2008 with a willed mind about wedding photography. After shooting 2 weddings, I realized how challenging it is. And it’s quite a hard pill to swallow –since I really thought at the first time I handled a camera that I would be seasoned wedding shooter– that I would less venture into this field. Perhaps, I will still see myself shoot a couple tying the knot, only on special occasions.

The last lens I purchased in 2008 turned out to be my favorite. A pre-AI 105mm f/2.5, it snaps into the mouth of the Nikon D40 well. And it makes me do wonderful photos, with amazing details, sharpness and color.

Rainy days usually put me to sleep. But it’s oftentimes the perfect setting for dramatic composition.

Bird Sanctuary, Candaba, Pampanga. It’s the first shooting trip with my friends from college. They’ve been bitten with shutterbug, so most of them now carry their own guns of singe lens reflex camera and lenses. We were supposed to photograph birds in flight, and steady, of different species and migratory in nature. That was in October, when typhoons and storms lurk the countryside. We were warned by the municipal office of flooding even before boarding the first ride towards the town of Candaba. We didn’t know it was this bad, that the locals have been used with this scenario and having their boats to live.

Less is More.

Mount Pinatubo. It took me almost 4 years to climb a mountain again. And what a sweeter thing to do with a camera on my back to capture images of nature, travel and a trek back to history.

I guess I’m leaning towards as a landscape artist. Before the year ended, we went back and visited my grandma’s place in Canaan West, Nueva Ecija. The place was perfect for a photographer who loves to shoot wide angles. Good weather, fair blue sky, a lot of clouds, vast farmlands, hills and mountains It was one of those events I would like to call superbowl for landscape artists.