Portraits {Sneak Peek at Sahar's Portrait Session}

Capping this week off with a 3 Frames post. It has been a long time since I did a portrait shoot with an MUA and I can really say that for portraits, engagements and other sessions, having a professional do your face for you will work wonders. I worked with Kim Tan on this shoot and he is probably one of the best MUAs currently working in my city right now. Made me think that for any occasion where there is even the slightest chance that you will be photographed, you should have your face done. What's great about make-up now is that you can have that natural, not-too-made up look and still look gorgeous and Kim does that flawlessly and in record time too! There are other good MUAs out there too, like Barbie Viliran, Tanzy Tristan, among others. If  you want to have good make-up done these are the people who can help you look gorgeous for any portrait. :)

And look! It's Friday! Great weekend coming up!

Facebook Likes and Missing Comments

I rarely post anything about what goes on behind my blogging but recently I felt confident enough to do a little tweaking with the  HTMLs and the foreign-sounding codes that you  can find in any Blogger blog and I thought I can do some changes there without hurting my layout. To cut the long story short, I messed stuff up, LOL! My comments were not appearing and this morning my Facebook LIKE button, which is such an easy way for readers to let me know that they visited, didn't show up. I'm glad online tutorials are always around to help me solve my problems. The links below helped me get my LIKE button back up and running in a matter of minutes and helped me solved my missing comments problem. 

Don't you just LOOOVEEEE the Internet? I do! Morning everyone! 

Helpblogger: Adding Facebook LIKE button to Blogger post 

The Tech Zone: Troubleshooting Comments for Blogger

Portraits {Sahar I}

When I first met Sahar I thought she looked foreign and I was right. She is half-Pakistani and at 17 is a willowy beauty with the most striking pair of eyes. A budding model, she wanted to take portraits for fun and to add to her growing portfolio. Her boyfriend Jonas was also with us for the shoot since we were doing the shoot in his house (and what a house!).

Although we started late, Sahar got into the poses in no time and I was cranking my camera every few seconds to capture her every pose. She is definitely a natural model and she knew how to move, how to arch her neck and how to flutter her eyelashes just so for a really arresting stare. In short, I had so much fun! I would hope she and Jonas had fun too! The sun was out almost two hours after we started, which was a bit disappointing since I really wanted to stay and take some more photos, but you really can't take portraits in the dark so we called it a day. Here's the indoor shoot which took us about 15 minutes before we had to run outside to catch the light. 

Couples {Indira+Bryan}

“I love you not only for what you are, 

but for what I am when I am with you.

I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, 

but for what you are making of me. 

I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” 

― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples, couples

Finally, this post is up. It's good to be back blogging about love and happy couples once again. Yolanda was a serious blow and for a week my heart broke a thousand times as I watched the news on TV .However, we also saw how unique Filipinos are in our perseverance and in our ability to smile in the midst of the worst calamities Nature can throw at us. And the amount of help we got! Mind-boggling, to see how the world came together, set aside petty differences, and got to the business of sending help our way. My faith in humanity has never been stronger. 

Now off to talk about love. Specifically, the one that binds this cute couple together. :) 

Indira and Bryan are perhaps one of the sweetest couples I have ever met. I got to meet Indira first  and I saw how sweet she was with her sister. I got to see more of that sweetness when I finally got to see her with Bryan. This laid back, fun-loving couple literally chased away the fog and the rain that threatened to ruin the one day that their wedding coordinator, Ate Rona of Purple Parasol, set for their shoot. It rained that morning, and I half-wondered, half-dreamt, if we were pushing through with the shoot. I mean, there was fog in my corner of the city! We rarely have fog and when we do, it usually blankets the entire place in this gray, gloomy haze, so much so that you won't have any difficulty imagining yourself in Ireland or any other place that suffers from perpetual gloomy weather.

However, since both of them worked and had in different towns and had busy schedules, rescheduling the shoot was out of the question. We had to work the little light we had. Fortunately, the rains stopped midway during the shoot and we got a few hours of precious light to take photos. What made the shoot easier was the presence of family members who were there to help out by bringing lunch and even assisting during the shoot (special shout out to Malaika, I's sister who was the perfect assistant!) They made the entire occasion the very definition of a family affair. Indira's parents were also very sweet, gracious and very accommodating and I immediately realized where she and her sister got their sweet and cheerful dispositions from. 

I will always have fun taking these kinds of photos. Seeing how two people can stay so in love after years of being together is such a comforting assurance that love can survive time and distance and all the other obstacles that most couples face. And there's also something about the way couples in love look at each other that is so wonderful to watch. They do not look at other people the same way! There's a look, a gaze, a smile, that appears only when they look at each other. And it's so wonderful just to be there, to be able to catch that. 

CutieMe

A friend of mine is selling these cute stuffed dolls that you can stick your face on to. Yes, literally. She has this supercool printer that prints faces to give the dolls a face (without faces, they still look cute!) She came by the house and I had fun taking photos of the adorable fluffy little things while doing a little bit of catching up with her. Check out her  CutieMe Facebook page for orders. :)

Yolanda

Prayers for Leyte, Cebu, Palawan and other places struck by Yolanda

The devastation that I see on TV is shocking. Although my hometown also braced for the storm, we experienced just a tiny fraction of what the people in Tacloban and other hard-hit areas experienced. The tragic scenes of men crying over dead wives and daughters, lifeless children covered in blankets, evacuation centers drenched and covered in debris-- it is heartbreaking and never something that one could wish on his worst enemy. As the water swelled and entered homes in Tacloban, we were safe, warm and dry inside our homes in Dumaguete, and even wondered if 'this' was it. Little did we know that in other places, people were fighting for and losing their lives. It is sad, the amount of lives lost. Could we have foreseen that the damage would be this great? Looking at how ravaged Tacloban is, the entire city should have been evacuated. Maybe no one saw it coming. We knew it was strong, but strong enough to pummel an entire city to the ground? Maybe not. 

I am rambling. There is no emotion but sadness. Sadness for all the lives lost, sadness for the survivors who are hurting for lost loved ones, for the survivors who have slept and will continue to sleep in the rain and cold, with little food, water, or clean clothing.

I really hope that this will be the last, at least until we get on our feet. We are a strong people, after all. But lately I have been feeling like we really deserve a break, a breather from all that's been going on. Suffering through typhoons and earthquakes is not a privilege in my book. An opportunity to learn lessons and test our capacity for kindness and strength, maybe, but to those who lost loved ones in the waves and floods, this is hardly a privilege that they would want to bear. 

Contact numbers for those looking to send help or donations can be found here.

Musings on a Sunday: Gratitude and November

I can definitely say that this has been a great two weeks. A friend of mine got married and I got to wear a pretty peach bridesmaids dress (don't you just love it when you get to wear a bridesmaid's dress that you love?), I bought a second battery for my camera (YaY!) I got to stay home and enjoy the afternoons and not worry about going to classes, and I got to shoot a fun and quirky couple who managed to bring in the sunshine to an otherwise foggy and rainy day (more of that engagement shoot in a later post!).

The week also brought a few realizations. The phrase "You are what you think about all day long" was running through my head for a couple of days. It would pop out of nowhere and I would stand there, reminded. I don't know why that quote stuck with me. Perhaps because school is out and I finally had the time to preoccupy my mind with other things that I love like taking photographs and reading the latest blog posts of my favorite photographers, playing with Pip and enjoying orange sunsets in Valencia, and discovering new places to eat! I think we are what we love, and how we show our appreciation for the little things that makes our hearts full are the things most people will likely remember about us when we are gone. A spirit of gratitude can definitely cancel out a great many irritants no matter how major they seem to be at the moment, and it is never that hard to carve out a few seconds of gratitude in a day... there is a multitude of things, big and small to be thankful for! And yes, it is finally November!!! Cannot wait to see what this month has in store for us!