Ever since I was a child, my hands were always busy doing something creative. I was a sickly child (darn you, asthma!) so there were long stretches of days being confined in our house and I had to find ways of amusing myself. I created villages out of cardboard and paper. I made paper dolls. I made notepads out of my parents’ scratch white papers. I picked out clean white pages of old notebooks and sewed the spines together to create new notebooks. I made watercolor paintings; they were not good but it helped me express myself. I remember when I was in 5th Grade that I was crocheting non-stop and was making crocheted pen holders that you can wear around your neck like a necklace. In those days, we often lost our pens and it’s annoying if we lose that one pen that writes perfectly. I sold those to my classmates and it did offset the cost of yarn.

In high school, I continued to draw but I concentrated on pencils. I copied the paintings from our art encyclopedia at home and I remember my favorite artist then was Rembrandt. Then I moved on to album cover art and my first one was the art on Guns N’ Roses’ album Use Your Illusion because it was one of the albums I and my guy friends were listening to back in 1993 (yes, I was one of the boys and that’s how I ended up forming a band right out of college with my high school classmates, but that’s for another blog entry).

One summer, my cousin who was taking up Fine Arts at UST taught me how to use graphite pencils properly, like how to shave the graphite to produce the powder to paint and blend the different grades. Later, I somehow lost interest in it so I concentrated on watercolors. I was happy with it even though I’m not good at it. I was always envious of people who were brilliant in drawing and painting. I remember I became friends with one boy (our common friend was a classmate) over art when I was 15 years old and was in Cebu competing in a national science contest for my research on fungi. He was really good at it but he didn’t pursue a career in the arts and instead ended up as a lawyer (yes, we’re still friends).

I was also into photography. In high school, I didn’t know the technical aspects of photography but I was always with a camera back then. I had so many photos of high school scenes that ended up in our year book. In college, I took up photography because I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist. Those were the days when we still used film so we were taught how to process our films and develop our photos in different formats. We used black and white films then (my favorite brand was Agfa) so we could concentrate on composition and exposure. I had to be judicious with the use of one film roll because black and white films were hard to purchase and chemicals for dark room processing weren’t cheap. So I had to remember which aperture and shutter speed to use under certain light conditions–I had to memorize all those combinations because light is tricky and it shifts. I could not rely on guesswork because I only had 24 shots or 36 shots at most.

I remember for action photography, I had to use my dog Kuting as my subject because I didn’t want to hang on trees to capture speeding cars. I wanted to have my own dark room then because I was so enamored of the entire process. My mom bought a Canon EOS Rebel II with 35-80 mm lens and 80-200mm lens because she knew I would be taking up photography. I went everywhere with that camera. Because of my keen interest in photography, my geologist uncle gave me his Nikon FM2 which he used in Antartica. That manual SLR is built like a tank and since it’s all manual, it does not have electronics that could freeze and malfunction. I also owned a Holga lomo camera just because. All of these babies were left in our old house and I wasn’t able to come back for them right after we moved to this apartment because the priority then was to remove ourselves from there as soon as possible. When I was able to sneak back into that house, all my cameras were gone. I think the girls’ dad took them with him to display in their museum of a house in their province (they’re hoarders).

When I became a field reporter, I always had a digital camera in my bag because you’ll never know what could happen. Which proved to be very true in my career. One of my incidental photos ended up on the front page of the newspaper I used to work for before. It occupied half of the front page that accompanied my big story the following day after I took the photo.

My first digital camera was an Olympus but I wasn’t happy with its color rendering. I moved on to a Fujifilm F30, which I loved to bits because of its film simulation settings and low light capability. Since owning that nifty camera, I’ve always bought Fujifilms. I didn’t invest in a DSLR because having owned an SLR that I lugged everywhere I went, I knew it was impractical for me to carry regularly with my laptop and go chasing sources down the hallways for interviews. I still have the Fujifilm XQ1 that I still use in my travels because an SLR is really impractical and cumbersome. A good compromise is a mirrorless camera (like any of the Fujifilm X series) that I can easily shove in my bag. A good focal length would be 35-55mm but it still looks too touristy–because I use my digicam mainly for travel–so the perfect lens would be a pancake lens…

But I digress…

I had/have so many creative outlets but I can’t say I’m brilliant in any of them. That’s why I’m envious of creative and talented people because they have a knack for it while I struggle to produce anything passable. I admire them and I hope that none of those creative people I’ve met lose their talent because they got sidelined (just like that artist-lawyer friend of mine and J).