Every now and then you get a chance to witness a family coming together and ironically, as the world supposedly has become smaller, this has become rather rare. This is the family of my mom. I took this in Lakawon island back in 2007 I think. These siblings haven’t been complete in 13 years until this time so this is one of those rare moments.
Click HERE for Charity:Water video!
http://www.charitywater.org
There are plenty of people I admire: the late Steve Jobs, Stefan Sagmeister, Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson, Pranav Mistry, Steven Spielberg, Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, my Tito Nene, my brother Robin, Ana Balcels, my most favorite couple in the world–Checcs and Jet Orbida, I used to admire JFK but realize I don’t know him that well, it was a time I can hardly relate to…
I realize that more than plain talent, it’s innovative ideas in making the world better or just plain excellence and extreme focus on whatever they did are what drew me towards these people.
But the person I can related to the most is this guy, Scot Harrison. Watch the videos! One is an interview on him and the other one is about Charity:water, the NGO he put up. Whenever I do something, I always think–what would Scot Harrison do and how would he do it?
When I was 10 years old, my parents took me and my siblings on a tour of the United States. It was really the first time we’ve been out of the country. It was life-changing because for the first time, things and places you only saw on the television were actually both real and fake. We got to see the fake stuff done in Hollywood of-course. It was the typical US tour.
But what stuck with me was this place…Yosemite. There was something pure and real about it.
Now, 30 years later…I visited my son Febuary of 2011 for his birthday. There was a long weekend so we took a trip to the mountains with some old friends of mine from Bacolod.
When we entered the mountains, we stopped by the view deck, we took some photos then went down Yosemite park. I took a shot of El Capitan with the warm sun lighting half of the wall. Then we set out to camp, found a nice spot, pitched our tents and started to build a fire. It was a perfect camp site. Ethan had such a great time with his tito Richard, tita Jana and tito Monette, the real campers.
By 9pm, I went inside the tent, it was getting too cold for me. Ethan loved the cold and so did the rest so they stayed by the fire and continued their barbecue and storytelling.
I woke up around 4am because I was hearing rain outside but it sounded different. When I went out, we were all covered in snow. Apparently, it snowed the whole night when we were asleep. Ethan got up around 5am and started playing in the snow as the sun was creeping in.
By 9am, the rangers were closing down the mounting and asking everyone to put on snow chains on their tires. Two vehicles skided off of the cliff because of the ice.
The day before, Yosemite was this lush green summer mountain with snow caps only on the mountain top. In one night of snow, it was a totally different place, a totally different look. Amazing.
I took these photos off of my Lumix LX3 as we left Yosemite.
Shot on a Fujinon S1, my very first DSLR. I think it was a 5 megapixel camera. I super loved that camera. It was a collaboration of Fuji and Nikon. The body was a Nikon but the digital technology was that of Fuji.