The Stray Yellow Birdie

Here in our place, it is very typical for me to see the little brown birds, which often do some sort of a convention on the big trees nearby. Seeing and hearing them every day (early morning and late afternoon), I am already used to them, so whenever I hear a different kind of tweet, I knew I just have to spot it and photograph it. That was the story behind this little birdie... and I was lucky when I saw it on the top part of the gate. However, as much as I wanted to take lots of pictures, the lighting condition seemed to not allow me.

Luckily, even if it flew, it didn't really flee away for it found a resting place on one of the tree branches in our garden. I couldn't come near it (fearing my presence would scare it), so I just spied on it and found a good way to capture its images through the window.

I will just let the pictures speak for themselves:


Isn't it pretty?

Well, the yellow part was quite small, but seeing a different kind of bird every now and then excites me.

Going Wordless This Time

More Images from Baguio City

I truly felt I didn't take a lot of pictures while I was in Baguio City for two days, but it makes me satisfied and happy that I have more images to share to you guys.


{My entry for Texture Tuesdays}

The prompt this week was "Dreamy" and  I truly had a difficult time thinking what to share, until I saw this picture. Original image had more space... I actually cropped out one more dancer at the right side of the image to make the spacing tight. On one of my previous posts, I did say that I love my camera's abilities to blur backgrounds (making the subject clear), but one of the bad things I didn't like about this camera is its limited abilities to capture moving subjects. The space was well lighted, but it cannot really freeze moving subjects clearly, thus some of the elements appear blurred.

Editing this image, I first made a selection around these four dancers using the paths tool... feathered the selection at 5%, made an inverted selection and blurred the background at 27%. This step I used over and over on selections near the dancers' arms and faces to achieve a uniform blurred look. From the original size, I then cropped it to 1000x750 pixels and made a rectangle selection of 640x480 pixels. From there I made these steps:

• Applied the "Mute Colors" script, using desaturated overlay to tone down the colors.
• Added a layer of Kim Klassen's "Poetic" texture, set to overlay at 80%.
• Added a layer of Kim Klassen's "Trust" texture, set to hard light at 25%. Flattened the image.
• Applied the "Urban Acid" script at 20%.
• Ran the "National Geographic" script, using my preferred settings.
• Ran the "Romantic" script, with layers tweaked a bit so it won't be too rosy.
• Flattened the image and added my watermark.

For this prompt, the blurred body parts worked good because it appeared dreamy. Still, capturing moving subjects proved to be difficult for me.

February is probably the biggest month for Baguio City because it's this month that they hold the Panagbenga Festival - the festival devoted to flowers, as "Panagbenga" meant "bloom." The grand street and float parade happened last weekend, which I wasn't able to witness because I was there last Tuesday and left the day after. Time may be limited, but I was able to take flower pictures:


These two flowers I captured around the grounds of SM City Baguio (a mall).


This one (is this Baby's Breath?) I captured after the event I attended, and was part of the floral centerpiece. Another reason why I love my camera: I can go as close as possible and still capture a great macro shot!


These three I captured along the grounds of the Staff House, while we were waiting for our companions before we travel back to Manila. Flowers are truly abundant during this time of the year in Baguio City... and I am happy to share that I will be traveling back to Baguio with my family this weekend. Hopefully time will be enough for me to capture more flowers from the Summer Capital of the Philippines.

The Kind Fisherman

Mondays are usually my lazy days to blog (probably because I often took time outs during Sundays), but I do love today's prompt on Quotography, so I want to be a part of this week's link party.


For this prompt, I went ahead to find the quote first before I search my files for a suitable image. At first I was thinking of sharing an image of a man helping other boat men at the port of Hundred Islands, and while editing it, I remembered this particular image.

For sure I have shared this image and the story behind it on some of my blogs, but let me share it again. In 2009, I was vacationing in my mom's hometown and a boring afternoon made my niece Grace and I decide to walk to Macallawan to catch the sunset and enjoy the beauty of nature.

We saw this man from afar and I took time to capture this relationship of the man to the nature. When we got near him, my chatty niece (she's only 12 years old that time) asked the man a few questions, which led to us exchanging stories. He told us he left a few baskets underwater that morning and came back that dusk to gather the crabs. He wasn't particularly doing it for a living, he was just gathering seafood to feed his family, and although his catch wasn't that much, he still gave me one crab so I can have it for dinner, too. I understood that he has a big family and that I had dinner waiting at home that night (no need for me to be taking a piece of food from their table), but his random act of kindness was something so sincere and touching, that I decided to take it.

His act may be little, nameless, and unremembered for him... but it wasn't for me.