I missed my Pop tonight

From the photo essay, Days with my Father by Phillip Toledano

This is for everyone who's lost a parent, or is living with aging parents.

Where the hell is Nico Sepe?

FOR those wondering where in the world is uber-hip photographer Nico Sepe, well, the answer is Sri Lanka! He wants all his friends and fans here in the Philippines to know he's still alive and wants to share some of his favorite photos with you guys.

(Galle Face promenade in Colombo. Famous among locals and tourist for enjoying the sea breeze of Indian Ocean.2007.)

Let me give way to his publicist's write-up:

THE canvas on which photographer Nico Sepe paints with light is the whole world.

His recent works are vignettes of daily life in Sri Lanka where he has been based since 2007.

Sepe knows no boundaries when it comes to fulfilling his fulltime commitment to photography. He documents realities with piercing rawness as he has done since the late 70s in the Philippines.

Last month, he continued this commitment in yet another photo exhibition: “Sri Lanka: Past Times in Times Present.”

"This is really a continuation of my commitment to photography. It never stops...I’m still around, still shooting and continuing my dedication to inform thru pictures," he said.

(Anaradhapura is one of the oldest cities in Sri Lanka. It is the site of the largest dagobas and water tanks dating back centuries ago. Its also a destination for Buddhist pilgrimage.2008.)

While most of the world see Sri Lanka as nothing but a place caught in the conflict between the Tamil tigers and the government, Sepe offers what he has witnessed – that of Sri Lankans' ordinary, day-to-day struggle to survive.

Sepe’s black and white images captured the lives of people in different corners of this South Asian country including the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, the ancient city of Anaradhapura in the northwest and the southwestern city of Moratuwa.

"I’ve never seen these angles before. It's different when it comes from a person who is not a Sri Lankan," he said.

This is not the end of it. Sepe is planning to hold another exhibit soon.

He doesn’t know for certain where his next stop would be but for now his home is Sri Lanka where he lives with his wife and two children.

Back here in the Philippines, he has documented the lives in the underground movement during the latter years of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in the 1980s.

(The fisherfolk of Galle, doing the traditional net pulling from the shore. Catch will be later distributed to everyone.2007.)

Since then Sepe has contributed significantly to documenting the social and political changes. Most assignments were commissioned by non-government organizations but his desire to photograph realities led him to fund some of the documentaries himself. Co-founder of the Center for Documentary Photography now known as the Philippine Center for Photojournalists and former senior staff of different newspapers and magazines in the Philippines, he has worked on various worthy book projects.

These include Philippines: A Journey through the Archipelago, the Philippine Navy's Tides of Change, the University of the Philippines' Sipat, the Ateneo de Manila University's Chinese-Filipino book and the coffeetable book “Portraits of a Tangled Relationship."

His works have been widely recognized by fellow photographers and various global institutions.

Nico Sepe may be reached at nicosepe@yahoo.com. His online galleries are at www.katumbukan.blogspot.com and www.nicosepe.com.

(Mahout and his elephant, a lifetime relationship.2007.)

I've been busy...

I have been remiss in my blogging duties as I try to balance my work assignments, running after potential interviewees, dealing with my Pop's car (which has been acting up again!), and trying to religious log into Facebook so I can extra coins to redecorate my cyberhome in the Yo-Ville application.

To top it all off, I recently started experimenting on editing photos via Adobe Photoshop Express (http://www.photoshop.com/express). While it is currently available for users in the U.S., it doesn't mean we outsiders can't log in. We can become members, as I have done, and use the truly radical features of the site. But be warned that the response time can be veryyy slow. It's still in beta so there are still bugs being tweaked therein, and you may experience frequent stalling on your web browser, especially if you have other sites opened as well. (It works best on a Safari browser btw. Amen!)

But I just love PX! It's great what one can do on a photo editing site...you can literally make colors appear where there are none in the original. And what I recently experimented with were scanned photos from my trip to Batanes back in 2003, when digicams were still not widely used. I was still using my trusty Pentax ME Super SLR on manual in those days, which is a super excellent camera, except that now it's gotten to heavy to lug around especially when I already have an great workhorse in the 3.2 mp Cybershot camera built into my Sony Ericssion K800i phone.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a little bit of what I've done on the PX site...I dunno if you can actually tell that some of the photos have been tweaked (like there are certain pics where the contrast was awful, so I had to fix that and make some colors "pop"). Photoshopping has been given a bad rap these days; PX is there to show you how amazing it can actually be.

Click http://akosistella.photoshop.com to check out my photos. Tell me what you think.

Btw I'm writing this paragraph and trying to publish this entry from my Palm Treo 680 via Opera mobile as my Bayan DSL has decided to give out tonight. Rats! Paging Bayan service support!