pentaxian nature photo eb

January 27, 2008

Woohoo, sarap matulog!

I uploaded pics to photobucket. I decided to upload only 100 pics since nobody looks at everything anyway… also so that I don’t have to upload repetitive and garbage photos… and also because I’m too lazy to upload more than once (100 at a time lang pwede magupload sa photobucket eh.. hehe…).

I also finally uploaded choice photos to my flickr page. The photos are bigger here. 1024 pixels on the longer side.

Anyway… as I was saying… Woohoo, sarap matulog! The only sleep I got yesterday was around an hour on the van on the way to tagaytay… an hour on the van from tagaytay to lipa… and then another hour on the van from lipa to manila. I was also quite pissed because I thought the pics I got were no good again… and also because I made some photography mistakes again that could have made the photos better. However, after viewing the pics this morning and editing them in Photoshop… They’re actually not half bad!

After bowling on friday night, I went back to the office (oh yeah, nag-blog pa nga pala ako nun) and got home around midnight. I took a bath, got prepared, and then left home around 2am to go back to the office and pick up my spare batteries, which I left to charge (but never actually needed during the trip). By around quarter to 3, I was already at shell in magallanes, which was the designated meeting point for the photo EB. I’ve never been to an EB or trip with these guys before and the only people I knew who were going were my officemates Jayjay and Cyron. Nevertheless, it was a what-the-heck-sige-na-nga-bahala-na type of decision for me, so I went along.

After waiting for people to arrive, the group of 20 were good to go by around 4:00. We got to tagaytay (basta yung area na may starbucks tsaka pancake house) by 5:30 and I had to find out the hard way that tagaytay at that time was friggin cold and very windy! Most of us (who didn’t anticipate the weather and temperature) were literally shivering for the first hour there. Buti nalang may dala akong extra shirt so I just wore that over what I was already wearing.

Most people had their gear (tripods and purrrty lenses) setup in no time to catch the sunrise. Some of them had more than one camera… most of them had more than one lens and lots of accessories. As I had no gear to speak off aside from my camera body and lens, I had nothing to setup and thus just waited for the sun to come up. As we were waiting there, we had a minor problem since there was a security guard who was trying to shoo us all away because the compound wasn’t open yet… Uhhhhm… 20 photo-entusiasts, fully setup and prepared for the sunrise versus one security guard. No chance in hell. Good thing the guard eventually realized that and left us to do our thing. Hehe.

As for the rest of the sunrise photo shoot, there’s not much to say, so here’s some sample photos nalang: 

Later on during the morning, nung medyo nakalabas na yung sun and malakas na yung sikat ng araw, I learned one technique that proved to be useful in this scenario… silhouetteing (sp?)! Several pics to illustrate:

 

As I was reviewing the pics later on, I was disappointed to see a good number of the sunrise pics have long rays of light, which to me are distracting (although some people might find it nice). You can see these dun sa photobucket album. The reason for this is because the aperture was too small, and I’ve learned that small apertures tend to do that to sources of light… you know, nagkakaron ng rays and shit… In some instances, this can make the photo better, but in this case, I don’t think it helped.

After catching the sunrise in tagaytay, we had breakfast in pancake house and then headed to Blueroze Park and Wildlife in Lipa for more photo ops. Dito ko na talaga ako nainggit dun sa may dala ng telephoto lenses… a 40mm prime lens in no lens to use for wildlife photography. I still did what I could and I was fairly satisfied with the bird photos that I was able to capture.

We stayed there until lunch and then went back to manila. That’s all there is to that. It was worth it. ^_^

Now to prepare for Pinatubo several weeks from now. ^_^