lighting confessions

This is the original of the background photo, shot by Myra Lambino-Ramos, Crystal Cave in Sequoia Park. i lit it up a little. oops, inverted it a little too.  confession time. forgive me. i sometimes light up some of the photos and videos here, photojournalists say it’s okay to light up or crop a photo as long as your tweaking doesn’t change the content but makes the visual easier to see…but you can’t invert them, in photojourn, that is (that probably also applies to nature photography i guess, unless you did your shot hanging upside down by a rig); you can’t brush or erase, etc., either, in photojourn (as well as in nature photography), it changes the reality you’re trying to document and bring to the viewers. Why do i invert some of the photos? it changes the “feel” or “mood” or “emotional content” (if you can find emotional content in stillife or landscape). The stalactites look like daggers in the original ; inverted, they look like growing stone plants. (i think). you also can’t alter a work without permission of the creator, under the Intellectual Property Code. But the photographer is my loving and lovable sister, i thought she would forgive me when i tweak just a teeny-weeny tiny bit to suit the background of the blog…. :), and i’ve made confessions… (leave enough alone kasi!)

more nature & food photography from Myra (final edit)

this is the organic market where Myra goes to. and so, these are organic apples. i was told once before that you could tell whether a fruit or a piece of vegetable  was organic if the appearance wasn’t perfect.

When it comes to professional work, i like perfect, BUT,  when it comes to shapes of fruits and…shapes of people’s faces and their appearances, i like… not-perfect — smiles that are quirky, noses that crinkle and wrinkle when the person is pleased, one tooth that’s slighly not aligned (they call it in Filipino, “sungki”), a strange gait or a peculiar way of walking…even accents! i like people with quaint, “homegrown”   accents (i don’t like people who’ve picked up their colonizer’s accents though, and never did anything about it) — the quaint ones,  i pick up the  intonation  after an hour; friends wonder where’ve been…

i’m blabbering.