communicating positively

our last friday event in july focused on thinking positive and communicating these thoughts creatively. in the above photo, each person contributed one item from their list of "things i like about myself." group members also chose happy songs that played in the background while they wrote.

the happy songs list:

the girl- city and color
what a wonderful world - louis armstrong
this will be our year - the zombies
autumn leaves - joe pass
life is good - mos def
soft shock - yeah yeah yeahs
mr. blue sky - electric light orchestra
three little birds - bob marley
there is a way - mos def
what cool breezes do - digable planets
BBQ - 2 skinnee j's
let the right one slip in - morrisey
in the aeroplane over the sea - neutral milk hotel


share your happy songs with those you care about. list them in the comments section of this post :)


sometimes we just doodle collaboratively the rest of the time.

summer cipher

i went to a b-boy/b-girl cipher during the summer. here are some featured images i captured. more images from this event are posted in my facebook album. enjoy :)

if you lay down the vinyl... they will come.


stretching is key


















"Each time a b-boy or a b-girl stepped in the cipher, they wrote their own generational narrative. Starting upright in the top-rock, hands up and stabbing like a gang-member in motion, feet moving side to side like Ali in a rope-a-dope, dropping down like James Brown, turning hurricanes of Spy's boricua footwork, exploding into a Zulu freeze, tossing in a spin and punctuating it all with a Bruce Lee grin or mocking Maori tongue-the entire history of the hip-hop body in a virtuoso display of style." - Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang

"the disney princesses are here! smile for them!"

my brother and his family came to visit this summer. we did a family portrait session their last day here. i had to con my niece in to looking up from the sand by saying things like, "the disney princesses are here! smile for them!" it totally worked :) here are a few images from the shoot.

sampayan

while i was in the Philippines, i spent a lot of traveling on the road. my parents live on a main highway in Bataan and it would take anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours to get to our destinations. we went out almost every other day and i started finding things i wanted to take photos of off the highway. since there wasn't time to stop for me to take pictures, i memorized landmarks so i would be ready to capture the next time we'd go out. with a fast shutter button finger, i shot from inside a moving van rolling down my window at just the right time.

of the many things i saw out of that van window, i was fascinated by all the clotheslines of laundry hanging out to dry. my auntie asked me why i wanted to take pictures of them. i explained how i liked the different compositions of lines and colors and how resourceful people were in finding places to construct them. next thing you know, everyone in the car started to help me spot them.

here is my "sampayan" collection: