I'm a writer, editor and photographer. These are the things I do best and enjoy the most. I'm also a businessman—sort of—who sells fine art photography (mine, basically) for extra cash.
    Last night , I met  Kaka  (See the blog Ode to Water), her boyfriend from Cebu, Ace, and a childhood friend of hers, Mary Rose. Ace and Kaka met me at Kitchen restaurant in Greenbelt 3 where we had dinner. Afterwards we walked to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and met Mary Rose.
    Basically, I had to meet Kaka because she's also a framer and I asked her to fix one of my pictures, entitled Spin. Spin is a black and white picture of the lotus flower— styled in avant-garde fashion—that mysteriously got some sort of fungus behind the frame glass. The image is 24" x 36", plus 10" on all sides for the frame and matte for 34" x 46" in total dimensions— framed and mounted.
    She was basically making a delivery.
    [I gave her the picture on Thursday the 13th in Bonifacio Global City, where we later hooked up with my friends and AIM classmates in MAP 10 (Managing the Arts Program, batch 10), Jeremy Domingo and Ku Aquino, for a couple of beers and a big bowl of tahong (mussels) at Italiannis on High Street. See blog vISIONS IN THE lIGHT/hanging out with Jeremy & Ku.]
    During dinner at Kitchen, our talk drifted toward producing bands, music albums and stage plays. I'm thinking of producing a band, or bands for that matter, and joining other friends in producing Shakespeare plays for schools.
    In both areas, Ace had direct experience. He produced, not one,but many bands in Cebu and was in fact a popular impresario in Cebu City. He managed bands and produced—sponsored is the word he used—gigs and albums. He said he left the business because the influx of money was inconsistent. Last night, though, he uttered that maybe it was time for him to get back into the music scene.
    Ace said he also produced El Filibusterismo for schools. It was a one-shot deal of 1000 tickets at P750  each.
    I'm doing research because I want to learn and eliminate as much risk as possible into the  business that I would like to get into one day.
    (About a week ago, I met my friend, Jovy, on Yahoo chat. She's a true  businesswoman, with a couple of dozen RTW stores all over Metro Manila between her and a partner. We delved into the taxi business that I also looked into sometime last year. After doing the math with a potential partner, it turned out the car company would be making money out of our sweat and tears for the first three years. No way!
    (Jovy said the difference between us is that she acts on impulse and intuition. I'm not surprised because she is more than a fan to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret—the best selling feel good, get rich, get everything you want in life DVD. One of its main tenets is to act when the universal nudge and creative impulse are there urging you on.
    (She was online in connection with her passion—related to The Secret, of course—as head coach to the Leadership Excellence Achievement Program, or LEAP, run by the Organizational Change Consultants International Inc., or OCCI. She said she was doing a fund raising in connection with her group but, because of a confidentiality clause, wouldn't tell me more than that.
     (I offered one of my pictures, Mayon & Country Lights, that she could sell it and get the money for her group. We didn't really talk about the details. Last year, in connection with another LEAP group, I asked a PR person from San Miguel Corp. if they'd care to donate juices and snacks for charity work. They did.
    (The picture is a black and white 26" x 40" image of Mayon volcano at dusk—printed on
Epson smooth fine art paper, using K3 inks—serving as a backdrop to the city of Legaspi as it evolves from daytime into night. I told Jovy it is a study in light and shadow, and serves as an allegory for the transitory nature of life.)
    So, in TCB&TL after the Kitchen, we met Mary Rose. She's an attractive  woman in her early 30s, vibrant, quick and witty. Mary Rose is taking a masteral program in Japan and is a scholar of the Japanese government.
    Before you know it, it was nearly 1:00 a.m. We didn't really notice. Our conversation was totally animated, and the place was full and loud; although the store was noticeably dimming  the lights as a signal that it was way past bedtime.
    The four of us walked back to Greenbelt 2, where we were parked on the 3rd level. Kaka and Ace took Spin out of their van and, for the benefit of Mary Rose (and  unintentionally the mall security and the girl behind the turnstile for the parking ticket), took the bubble wrap off my picture. It was like an impromptu, mini exhibit.
    The cleaning of the glass was professionally done. Kaka also had the boys in her shop to replace the plywood backing with acid-free foam board.   
    Kaka said the picture turns her on. She doesn't know why.
    Ace said it's sexual.
    Mary Rose did not comment.
    For me, Spin is an image I first saw through the eyepiece of my Nikon D100, and through the macro lens I was using then in Bangkok, Thailand—where I shot Spin four years ago on a tabletop in my home studio. I remember the image gave me more than a rush and got me quite excited.
    Mary Rose? With the bright smile on her face, I think she liked Spin.
    We said goodbye and goodnight and parted ways.
    If you're wondering about the title and what's it got to do with this blog, here it is. It's been a while since I've paid attention to my Multiply. Since January, in fact. I was holding a copy of Personal Fortune, and cross checking my article against the blog I was uploading—tHE eASY lIFE. Afterwards, I read about an article in the magazine on how to make money from blogs.
    Three things I remember from the article. 1) You must be consistent in blogging, as in doing it daily in order to gain a following; 2) but you can't write just about anything—meaning you have to be a specialist in a particular subject, or topic, so that people get to identify you with your blog; and 3) you make money basically by registering with Google AdSense and choosing advertising related to your blog; that means the number of hits on the ad on your blog translates into revenue.
    The question on my mind was this: Can I be considered "specialist" enough that people can brand me with the kinds of posts on my Multiply?  Or am I too general in the sense that  my topics and subject matter are too diverse, too distended in the sense that they relfect  more of a jACK o oL tRADES, mASTER o nONE kind of blogger than a specialist?
    Sigh...
    But then again... All I know is that I enjoy Multiplying.
    To me, that is the litmus test.

(Dear All, this article came out in the March 2008 edition of pERSONAL fORTUNE—the monthly magazine of Business Mirror—entitled For the easy life: Sony takes aim at the single-lens reflex market. vICsOL)

LIFE is indeed easier for the photographer. Gone are the days when even the amateur must calculate and fine tune focusing distance, lens opening and shutter speed in relation to ambient light and ISO rating in order to take a picture that is considered passable. Automation took care of all that and more.
    The digital camera even knocked off the most dreaded equation in photography: darkroom work. No more developers, fixers; no more wash and bleach. The MacBook Pro and Photoshop took care of those messy and dangerous chemicals.
    The latest contender in the realm of digital single lens reflex camera is entertainment and gadget conglomerate Sony Corp. Its Alpha series has become the company’s flagship and the A700 has come head-to-head with Canon’s 40D and Nikon’s D300. This article though will not go into the nitty-gritty of comparisons and distinctions, as well as the technical differences in digital artifacts in images shot at ISO 400 and above among the three cameras.
    The A700 gives the photographer the option of using Compact Flash memory card after the A100. It would have been fine, except that the default seems to favor the memory stick, and photographers who’ve encountered this situation interpreted it as a proprietary issue skewed toward Sony products.
    It’s a bit annoying, although the photographer can easily override the default by going to the menu and choosing Compact Flash under the Memory Card setting. Hopefully, Sony’s technicians will have remedied this annoyance in the A800.
Because the A700 is basically aimed at the advanced amateur—so are the 40D and D300—the novice may be inundated by the array of buttons and dials on the top and back of the camera. Only after a bit of extensive use changing the ISO, white balance and drive settings in the heat of a shoot would their significance come to light.
    Sony has designed the Alpha series, particularly the A100 and its advanced brother, the A200—sold in Thailand since January; available by March in the Philippines—to wean Cyber-shot users from point-and-shoot to single lens reflex photography.
    A note of comparison and a to backtrack a bit, the Alpha architecture is based on the Konica Minolta Maxxum D series. Sony has acquired the entire camera division of Konica Minolta in 2004. The A700 uses a CMOS sensor, the A100 the CCD or charged coupled device. Sony explains in documents available to the public that a CMOS sensor is faster and produces less digital artifact, or noise. It also has a Bionz image processor—Sony’s latest image computing device that it claims is optimized for the sensor to take up to 5 frames per second and process up to 18 raw12.2-megapixel files.
    Despite the digital camera, photography remains a tool-based preoccupation. Thus, considerations like exposure—the amount of light that should reach the film, or light sensor in digital terms, to capture a scene—remain the photographer’s call. This is what make’s photography as exciting as when the birth of the medium was officially proclaimed in August 1839 at the Institut de France and, at the same time, Louise-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was honored as its inventor. The power of the photographer remains in making a decision on exposure and getting it right.
    Today’s cameras have seen a transition from instruments of limited capabilities during the first half of the 20th Century, compared to the slew of automatic SLRs that came out in the 1970s, to sophisticated digital gadgets that give the photographer options based on level of know-how. For example, by turning the dial on the top left of the A700 to auto, the camera becomes a virtual point-and-shoot. All a photographer needs to do is aim and press the shutter release button. The computer, or processor that is at heart of today’s gadgets, does the rest, from calculating focusing distance, lens opening and shutter speed to white balance and ISO sensitivity. The difference being the A700’s hefty size and weight compared to the real point-and-shoots, like the Canon’s G9, or Nikon’s Cool Pix P60 or Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-W200.
    Today’s advanced amateur uses the camera to take what is known as street photography—taking pictures while strolling in the city or the forest—portraits, landscapes and still life. For this article, the A700 went through the rigors of travel—Bangkok, Thailand, and Singapore. Thus, a number of photos that border on a theme of travel accompany this article.
    What is noticeable about the A700 is its responsiveness to its settings, like a brand new car that drives well. For example, in Bangkok on the Chao Phrya river, I bracketed for three consecutive frames at one-third exposure levels apart. Despite, the difficulty of the ambient light—the scene perpendicular to a bright mid-afternoon sun—the camera was able to capture images that are correctly exposed. (By the way, all the images here apart from having been resized are unedited. Meaning, they weren’t corrected for brightness, contrast, sharpness and tonal values in Photoshop.)
    The same holds true for pictures I took along Singapore’s Promenade by the harbor. The camera was able to read the light correctly—an essential element in taking good pictures.
    In restaurants in Makati, Bangkok and Singapore’s Dempsey district, using the macro mode with flash on programmed automatic, the A700—hand-held—delivered more than passable images that would likely whet the appetite of foodies and stylists alike. This is because of the anti-shake technology that is built into the camera body—a legacy of the Konica Minolta design—and compares with the vibration reduction technology of Nikon and the image stabilizer function of Canon. Unlike Sony’s though, Nikon’s and Canon’s are built into the lens.
        Even in indoor low light conditions with high ISO settings, the camera produced images with passable tonal transitions even to those with a discerning eye.
    Despite being the new kid on the block, compared to Canon and Nikon—leaders in the field of digital single lens reflex camera—Sony has come up with a fine instrument in the A700. This camera is definitely a tool in the box that makes life easier for the photographer.
 

The writer, editor--an artist in her own right--Carla Casanova shall read poetry on Friday 5 Oct 07 at 5 pm to celebrate the opening of vISIONS IN THE lIGHT at the Ayala Museum ArtistSpace.

See you there...

The young photographer Noel Salazar will shoot the opening cocktails of vISIONS IN THE lIGHT. It would be great to see him do his stuff in the spirit of photography by photographers for photgraphers.

Managing the Arts Program batch 10, or MAP 10. That was our two week stint in April 2005 at the Asian Institute of Management. We were the last batch before the program was moved to the CCP. Now the same program is running under the acronym META at the Peta Theater building in Quezon City.

Two MAP 10 guys who turned out to be my pals are theater actors Jeremy Domingo and Ku Aquino. Their Word of Mouth productions staged Aqua Barkada at the RCBC Theater. I took the pictures.

Last night we kind of hang out at bang coffee on T Morato. Ku and Jeremy came from Peta with Miguel, also a theater actor. Ku and Miguel were in the Peta play Romulus da Great! and Jeremy was in the audience.

(I came from the office-Yes. Journalists work on Sundays. On the way I took our editorial writer Dave Llorito to Glorietta where he was supposed to pick up the book We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and the Reshaping of of the Law int eh Internet Age. (Yes. Journalists like us read such stuff.) Dave sent me an sms last night as I was driving along Ortigas Avenue that he ordered the book for me too and that I could pick it up anytime at Bibliarch.)

Well, we didn't really just kind of hang out. Jeremy and I were supposed have a quiete dinner at Little Asia across the street from bang and talk about vISIONS IN THE lIGHT, as I asked him to host the opening program on Friday 5 October 2007 at 5 pm at the Ayala Museum Artist Space. But the place was full.

They were there earlier and I arrived around 7:30. Before you know it it was close to midnight.

It was great hanging out with Ku and Jeremy. (Miguel left earlier.) The way they talk transported me to another space and time. It was about theater, about journalism, about photography, life--how it sucks and how its really great.

Well, I'm lookin' forward to 5 October 2007, Jeremy hosting vISIONS IN THE lIGHT.

Poster #5 for vISIONS IN THE LIGHT from the Ayala Museum

This article came out in the Archikonst magazine July 2005 edition in conjunction with my exhibit at the then Epson Katha Digital Imaging Gallery in Glorietta. Goodbye, Summer is my second solo exhibit here in the Philippines since I started coming back in October 2004. The first was in May of the same year, entitled Unnatural Habitat at the The Enterprise Center Art Hall –VS


Goodbye, Summer:
A visionary look at the lotus flower
and the beaches of Boracay
through digital photography

To many the term digital photography conjures images that are overly software-edited and have that experimental look that is not easily recognizable. Not true at all when it comes to the photographs of lotus flowers and Boracay by Vic Sollorano, on exhibit through to June 15 at the Katha Epson Digital Imaging Gallery in Glorietta 3, Makati Commercial Center.*
For Sollorano, the equation is simple: digital photography = photography using a digital camera or a camera with a digital back + edited on a computer using an image editing software.

The 34 pieces included in Goodbye, Summer reflect that simple way of defining the world, in the sense that they are accessible in terms of composition and technique.
Sollorano's images of lotus flowers rest on basic table top photography, using natural light bounced and shaped around the subject with the use of mostly home-made reflectors, as in Styrofoam panels and aluminum foil. He also used a gold and white reflector from high-end Italian maker of photographic equipment Manfroto.

Also shot in natural light, the images from Boracay reflect location photography that is uncomplicated. These are ordinary seascapes, beach life if you will, rendered in a masterful way.

What makes Sollorano's images unique is that they are not easily recognizable in terms of place and time, like some novel idea that may disappear forever if one fails to grasp them. But often than not, they produce that aha! experience in the beholder, an insight assuring us that, as in the case of Goodbye, Summer, these are just lotus flowers and scenes from a tropical Philippine beach.

Sollorano follows two basic principles of composition, the rule of thirds and intuition. Mostly he depends upon his instinct, because there is that element of communication with the inner self, whose judgment defies logic and aesthetic standards. Also, the results are often a surprise. The photographer sees something beautiful, frames it through the lens regardless of placement or positioning of main subject and focal point. He presses the shutter release. And voila! The image is captured forever.

Regardless of the approach to composition, Sollorano says, the image that works best has mass, or an intrinsic quality that attracts us to it. For him, though, pictures that resonate are the ultimate test of whether it works or not as a piece of art.
After our initial attraction we are hooked, Sollorano says. "We are hooked and engaged in a dialog with the picture whose resonance seems to respond to the way we resonate. In the end we are a slave to our level of perception.”


*The exhibit actually ran through July, as the next group that was supposed to show their stuff at the gallery was delayed.—VS

The Visions in the Light Statement

Visions in the Light is my response to nature, in this case the lotus flower. I am awed and amazed by this encounter. My curiosity is stirred. If a lotus could speak, it would have said to me, Come; explore my endless possibilities, for I can be a thousand other forms without losing the essence of my nature.

The camera serves as an extension to my eye, the lotus an object of desire. My two-pronged ambition is simple: bring forth its tonal range within the bounds of black and white; and journey through its undulating texture.

I want to create something new, give life to an image that has always been part and parcel of a cultural scene for more than 2000 years, but never been explored before in the way that I do. In more ways than one, I have reached that vision through Visions in the Light. The essence of my being dictates that I share them with you. –Victor Sollorano