Four cheap ways to do macro shots

Even a disgusting fly looks oddly gorgeous upclose.

I've been fiddling around macrophotography lately using different techniques without buying an actual, professional macrocamera or macrolens. Here are four ways I've done so, DIY.

Murals in TUP Manila

On one of my lazy strolls in the streets I haven't explored I stumbled upon rows upon rows of amazing murals outside the wall of TUP Manila. According to this article, the murals were created two years ago by TUP's art students as part of its 113th anmiversary. There were a total of 55 murals!

Modern Baybayin, anyone?

Baybayin has seen a resurgence in popularity lately, and for reasons that are unclear. Perhaps the popularity of Kdramas and animé has made us suddenly envious of our Asian neighbors who do not use boring Latin-based alphabets.

There’s a problem though. Baybayin, being a pre-Hispanic writing system, is completely unfit to write modern Filipino. I believe that if we want to sustain the popularity of Baybayin it has to be modified into something functional. This has been done before by some Baybayin fans, some even adding the equivalent of phonetically redundant English letters such as C and Q. I personally don’t think this is the right way to extend Baybayin since it has existed independently from any Latin-based alphabet.

Movie Review: Kita Kita

Kita Kita is a light, cheesy romantic flick, but not the usual one. Girl gets temporary blindness, meets Boy, who is not exactly physically attractive. What will happen if Girl regains her sight? It’s very novel premise, and perhaps, the only thing that keeps the plot together, like a dish that has one main ingredient, the rest being a dash or two of this or that spice. This simplicity comes as a virtue, especially for a film whose main goal is magpakilig. For the first half where Girl goes blind, the movie wanders into Kdrama territory, indulging its audience with the beauty of Sapporo using perfectly sanitized shots. Then – not-so-spoiler alert – Girl regains her sight and some twist of sort happens. The masterplan of an intricately planned plot is revealed. You either enjoy the cleverly written story – which is what most people experienced, or, if you are like me, you are jolted out of the lives of the characters you have come to love, into the ugly feeling of being aware that you are in a cinema. The suspension of disbelief came crashing, though not into complete disappointment. It’s not a bad movie, not an exceptional one either. But it’s cute and I had a few good laughs. Still recommended. Rating: 6 of 10.

(Photo above is a screenshot from the trailer.)

Vietnam is matcha heaven

I almost always need caffeine during daytime. Energy drinks are packed with sugar, so coffee has become my only source of caffeine over the years. It's been the necessary evil I've had to live with, along with the palpitations, the bitter taste, the acidity. That is, until I learned about the effect of matcha. It's like coffee, but caffeine is released into the bloodstream more gradually, resulting into a prolonged awake yet relaxedstate. It's like green tea except that you consume the whole leaves. The tea plants are grown in conditions different from the usual tea, and the leaves are harvested immediately and dried to prevent fermentation. This gives matcha its unique, bright green color, and earthy taste. I've been consuming matcha in different forms - cake, crepe, and most often, as latte - but I've only thought about replacing coffee with matcha after doing my usual rounds reading random Wikipedia pages. Matcha sold in cafés are expensive, so I thought about prepqring my own matcha.

There's a problem, though. I've scouted all major grocery stores and found no matcha powder. I haven't tried Japanese stores yet but I've only seen actual matcha powder in Healthy Options. It costs - gasp! - 500 pesos per box.

You can imagine how happy I was when, on a recent trip to Central Vietnam, I found an entire shelf of matcha. I've known Vietnamese to be huge tea fans but I did not except matcha to be available in their grocery stores, considering that they are completely absent in ours.

Chillin at Nhon Hai Beach and Hon Kho Island

I used to be a fan of beaches, that is, until I went to Bauan, Batangas and joined a group of free divers. There's just so much more in the oceans to be fussy about whether the sand in the beach is white or not. So in my sidetrip to Quy Nhon before the start of the conference I'm attending I decided to go to a beach in Nhon Hai, a fishing commune about 30 min from Quy Nhon, and which, I've read, has a nice diving site.

Quy Nhon is the laidback beach town of your dreams

Immediately after I exited Saigon’s international airport I was barraged by cab drivers. I was supposed to go to Quy Nhon, a city in central Vietnam, by train, but the earliest ticket I could book was in four more days. I have been warned by blogs that trains in Vietnam can be easily fully-booked, but my contact in Quy Nhon told me that I could book a plane ticket on the same day. I wanted to experience what it’s like to travel on a sleeper train and lazily stare by the train window for hours, watching scenes from the countryside.

Fat chance.

[Attempting] Freediving

What most people don't realize is that swimming isn't just a single skill but rather a collection of several different skills. Being able to swim horizontally on the surface of the water (think freestyle, breaststroke, etc) is a different skill from being able to stay afloat in a stationary position (treading). Another skill, one which I am yet to acquire, is diving. So on one weekend I decided to join a group of freedivers called Team Rocket for some freediving tutorials. They arranged pretty much everything for the 2D 1N trip and all we were left to do is to freedive, or at least attempt to.

Movie Review: In This Corner of the World

Wars are a very common theme in anime, but this movie treats this trite subject differently. It focuses on the coming of age of a teenage girl who moves in with her teenage husband after an arranged marriage. Together with her husband's family, they go through and survive the hardships of the war. The cell animation, a rarity in modern anime, is visually stunning, kind of Hayao Miyazaki-esque but still very different. Despite being set during World War II Japan, the movie is still mostly dreamy, warm and funny. It didn’t hurt that the director threw in some abstract painting-ish scenes as icing on an otherwise already perfect cake, reflective of the main character who is a talented artist. After Kimi no Na Wa, I didn't know when I’ll be blown away by an anime next, or by a movie, for that matter. But this one did. Rating: 10/10.

(Image above is a screenshot from the official trailer.)

Movie Review: Kimi No Na Wa

I am huge Makoto Shinkai fan, so this review is bound to become completely unobjective. But consider this – I also run the risk of experiencing disappointment, if the story flops, or boredom, if this movie turns out to be just a derivative of his previous works. So how was the movie? Simply put, there are no words. The animation, the story – both are perfect in every way. Given Shinkai’s immensely popular anime films, I wondered if he still had something else in his sleeve, and he did. This movie, while bearing his signature romantic theme and gorgeous animation – no doubt a Shinkai creation at every frame - is still completely different. Rating: 10/10.

(Image above is a screenshot from the official trailer.)