the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

and finally, the marine creatures we can all relate to: fish! except that some of them come in forms that might not be so comfortable for some to look at. i've arranged these from the cute anemonefish to the bigger groupers, the edible schools, the odd-looking ones (which are still fish, by the way, have no doubt about that), to my first decent photos of a turtle and a shark, both taken in tubbataha at no deeper than 20 feet.

ok, so by now you're probably saying, "what the..?". in english, it just means sea slugs, sea cucumbers, and other invertebrates (uh...animals without backbones). that's seastars mostly, a giant clam, and two slipper lobsters. so i've always had a problem shooting nudis because they're so small, and my camera has a problem focusing on tiny things, and i get swept by the current so my shots come out blurred, yada yada yada. but since i was diving every day for 20 days in palawan and 3 days in batangas (with EXTREMELY strong currents), pretty soon i learned how to do it properly, i.e. getting them sharp AND with the right colors. what makes nudis so fascinating is, again, their incredible variety in color and pattern--the more flamboyant, the more poisonous. don't say they didn't warn you.

looking for a unique wedding motif? why not try a coral reef? (hey, that rhymes!) if you've ever wondered why divers make so much fuss over coral reefs, well, here's my answer to it. come to think of it, i never really appreciated them as i did this summer--all the gorgeous colors and shapes made up of corals, algae, sponges, ascidians, and bryozoans that collectively we call the reef community. and i still find it amazing that we have a God who creates pink corals =D (when he could've just fashioned some boring stones for fish to live in) pictures from my palawan and batangas research expeditions (22 April to 9 May and 19 to 23 May, 2007, respectively). one of the most important things i learned during the trip was the value of custom white balance underwater. yes folks, no more messing with flash and strobes for me (at least while i still can't afford therm =P). and the rest, as they say, is history....

i am sitting on a bamboo bench in anilao, batangas, crickets chirping, darkness in the streets... and multiply-ing on an HSDPA connection shared via a wireless LAN connected to four other laptops on the table. at first we tried it with a 3G phone sharing its internet connection (P10/ 30 mins) with a laptop using bluetooth, but then another member of our team arrived and just happened to have this cool plug-and-play gadget that can run up to 3.6 Mbps. and it's on a fixed monthly subscription, so we can surf all we want! the things you can do when you experiment with techie stuff =D tomorrow, we do our dives, then move to verde island on sunday (the center of the center of marine shorefish biodiversity in the world--google it) for more research dives. on oceanweather.com we learned that there's a typhoon heading our way, so we might be stranded on the island, but who cares when we have internet wherever there's a cellphone signal? as for the rest of my summer...last week i ...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia Published in May 2007 On Sundays, I’ve learned, the two-kilometer academic oval in the UP Diliman campus connecting the Oblation monument to the edge of the Sunken Garden is closed to vehicles both public and private. On this sacred day, joggers and bikers rule the road. And not just college students clad in shorts and running shoes wanting to stay fit. Aged 3 to 63, small, tall, thin, and large, leather shoes, rubber shoes, slippers, and sandals, bicycles, tricycles, baby strollers, walkers--the diversity of UP’s Sunday exercise crowd spans the spectrum of middle-class society on a break from the necessity of a workaday routine. Serendipity has brought me back to Manila this summer, almost ten years since I was a student calling it my transitory home. To this--a late Sunday afternoon walking across the wildness and the oldness of UP’s cracked sidewalks and grassy fields, which I have always preferred to my own university’s we...