L eaving Manila after a few days of some amazing street photography we headed out in our private bus, north towards Baguio, the summer capital of Luzon.
I’ll drop in two final portraits from the streets of Manila, just because I want you all to know that the Philippines is such a great place to meet and photograph people. Everyone is incredibly friendly, and there are smiles everywhere. Obviously the children are easy to photograph, but the adults are equally as happy to have their photos made.
As I write this post, we are in Vigan, having just finished an amazing road journey thorough the mountains of Northern Luzon. It’s an incredible landscape of towering mountains, lush tropical zones and cool, misty pine forests.
Our first stop was near Baguio, where we witnessed strawberry cultivation. This was an opportunity to use fill flash.
Flash is often thought of as something to use when shooting in dark situations, but actually, I find it most useful during mid day, when there are shadows on the faces of of subjects who are wearing hats. In these two photos, I used fill flash and stopped down my lens to balance the exposure of the sky (underexposed to bring out the blue) and the face of the subject.
The use of flash during mid-day sun allows you to keep shooting, in other than the “golden” hours of the day.
Your killing me!!!, well, in a good way that is. You are playing in my former back yard. I work with an NGO, Summer Institute of Linguistics, and lived in a small town (Bagabag, just outside of Solano) in northern Luzon for a number of years. I’ve been all through those mountains via 4×4 and dirt bike taking Bible translators out to their allocations. Just be glad the road is now “finished” to Sagada, or you may not have had energy enough to write this post:-) Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Oh, and as always, great photos!
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Hi Rodney, thanks for the comment and I’m glad to take you down memory lane..it must have been awesome to explore the area for an extended period of time, especially on a motorbike. The \new road\ is still under construction, and the short cut to the coast, from Sagada to Cervantes is still not finished, so we had to back track a bit and take the road through the National Park. The scenery on that highway rivals anything you might find on Kauai. Stay tuned as I will be blogging and showing pictures of our trip west from Sagada through Cervantes. Cheers, Karl
Hi Karl,
Just to add info. The route that we passed was Cervantes-mangkayan-abatan road that connect tagudin-cervantes-sabangan road. We passed the Cervantes-mangkayan-abatan road to avoid crossing the river at cervantes bridge of which still not fix.
Karl – love the shot of the little girl. Awesome!