Last weekend, I got the privilege of being Theodore's (aka Peanut) God Parent.  Since we didn't see anyone covering the event, our instinct was to somehow capture this milestone with the only camera available to us... a Samsung Note 4.

This made me and Cali realize that event photography is not about having the latest and most expensive gadgets.  It's all about celebrating life and making sure people can relive the event over again through the photographs.

To my inaanak, hope this simple coverage remind you of your first step in your Christian life.  May you grow more not just in weight and cuteness but also in the love and grace of God.

Church: Sta. Rosa de Lima Parish, Pasig City
Reception: Comida China de Manila
Photobooth: Peek 'n Click :)

The Truly Rich Club Entrepreneurship Seminar

I was very blessed to attend the two-day seminar for entrepreneurs conducted by Dean Pax Lapid through Bo Sanchez' Truly Rich Club.  It was an enlightening experience to witness a synergy of different business mentoring ideas from the top business mentors.

A very good topic discussed was that if you are technically the expert in a field, it doesn't follow that you can make the business in that area.  Being technical doesn't equate to being entrepreneurial, a concept that I know but was not very aware of prior to this seminar.

In PnC Phtography, we wanted to grow so that we could serve more clients.  However, for the past few years we were focusing on the the technicalities, doing R&D's and product improvements, but didn't put much effort on approaching growth through an entrepreneur's eyes.  Thus resulting to a minimal growth in terms of operations.  By applying what I've learn in this seminar, it widen my horizon to take a step back and identify areas more than the technicalities of the business, so that we could pursue our dream for this company.

Our vision for PnC Photography was to let more people experience happiness in their events and partner with us so that we could capture those happy moments.  Having been equipped with a lot of ideas and methodologies and frameworks through this entrepreneur seminar, hopefully we could develop and implement strategies into making this vision into reality.

Many thanks again to the business mentors of this TRC Entrepreneurship Seminar and for allowing me to meet other business-minded people so we could help each other and provide quality services and products to our nation.  God bless everyone.

Extreme day!

A very exciting day for the family as we're able to confirm that, yes! we're indeed having an addition to our family.  We're in awe as we finally confirmed the heartbeat coming from Cali's tummy.  What made it extra special was the fact that we're able to recover from our last year's tragedy of a failed pregnancy.

So after the good news as much as we wanted to celebrate, we rushed to Heirloom for our debutant's (Micah) pre event shoot.  It was our first time to do the shoot in that venue with minimal information about the place.  Good enough when we arrived, the owner, Mr. Juco was a member of Couples for Christ so we have something common to talk about.  Based from our conversation, he's just into metalworks, designs and arts and wasn't intentionally making his place as a pre-event location shoot as a business.  A good thing about the place was that if we're finding it hard to see a good location in other pre event venues, here, there's a lot of space to shoot from.  I think there's too many angles and spots that you can't fit all of your planned shoots just in a day to capture everything. 
 
One of the things I realized in this shoot was the importance of team work.  With all the suppliers working in an event, for this example, a debut, every role is important and that everyone is equal in terms of the value they add to the shoot.  I remember one photographer who was featured in Manila Bulletin that no one should feel above the other event suppliers.  Meaning, even if you're the most expensive photographer, you can never put yourself on a pedestal and snob the other suppliers.

So for us, in order to produce a good photo, we need to work with: the Stylist, Make Up Artist, Models, Videographer and the Venue Owner and of course the subject.

Quite unusual for our debut shoot is that our model gets her energy from vodka which worked out well as she was able to overcome shyness when projecting in the camera.

We packed up by about ten in the evening already.  As if the day wasn't long enough yet, we needed to rush back to Laguna to deliver the photos to one of our wedding clients.

Joining the selfie craze... I just noticed that we've been doing the business for quite some time and I really haven't taken my own pic with our photobooth.  So here it is in one of the events we had in amdocs, an IT company contracted by Globe to provide service to them.  There were some big time guests including the Ambassadors of Israel and India and Globe's CEO.

Scottish Rite Temple, March 9, 2014 - It's difficult to start off a blog but can't resist on not blogging this special event that we cover for today (March 9, 2014).  

We were invited to serve in the 65th Anniversary of Demolay Loyalty Chapter.  We absolutely have no idea what to expect and who were the Demolays.  So as a first action plan, I went to wikipedia to find out who they were and here's what I got from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolay:
DeMolay is open for membership to young men between the ages of 12 to 21 of good character who acknowledge a higher power. Currently about 15,000 active members are in the United States and Canada[1] and additional members have active chapters in Italy, Germany, Romania, Peru, the Philippines, Australia, Aruba, Bolivia, Serbia, Japan, and Brazil. At present Brazilian DeMolay has more active members than even the United States, making Portuguese the most commonly used language in DeMolay chapters. The group model is of mentoring; adult men and women called advisors, often past DeMolay members or parents of DeMolays, mentor the active DeMolay members. An advisor is referred to as "Dad Smith" instead of "Mr. Smith". Appropriate ways for the young men to address their adult guides were discussed by the members and advisors early on, and "Dad" was adopted as the best way to convey both friendliness and respect. Advisor mentoring focuses on the development of civic awareness, leadership skills, and personal responsibility.

Founded by Frank S. Land, a Freemason, DeMolay is modeled after Freemasonry. With the sponsorship of a Masonic body, a DeMolay chapter often meets in a lodge room or, if not in a lodge room, in some other appropriate room within the same building. Although none of the youth groups are "masonic organizations" as such, DeMolay is considered to be part of the general "family" of Masonic and associated organizations, along with other youth groups such as Job's Daughters and Rainbow. As with Rainbow, a family connection to Masonry is not a prerequisite for membership into DeMolay.

DeMolay has seven Cardinal Virtues, which constitute the basic ideals and essential teachings of the organization. They are:

• Filial love (love between a parent and child)
• Reverence for sacred things
• Courtesy
• Comradeship
• Fidelity
• Cleanness
• Patriotism

But even with this wiki description, I still didn't understand what they do.  Like Masons, their organization was enveloped with mystery.

So we were quite early setting up in the Scottish Rite Temple.  In this event, we're providing both photo coverage and photobooth service  We were lucky enough to have our friend Freizer, do the shooting for us so we can man the photobooth in our assistant's absence.  So during ingress our sponsor told us that VP JC Binay will be their guest of honor as  he was also a DeMolay during the 60s.

Wow, we have a celebrity, err, politician guest in our coverage.  It was exciting to see the vice presidential security group doing a thorough security check hours before the vice president arrives.  Then the time came when the special guest of honor walks in.

My first thought when he walked in... "Nice, I'm whiter than he is :)".  When everyone settled in our photographer waited for the VP's speech being the highlight of this event.  Of all the time that he would need to answer the call of nature, it was during the time when it's VP's time to go up the podium.  I could see that there were some panic attacks from the security when my friend went to restroom while I took over the photography coverage tasks.  Later I found out that there was one security personnel guarding my friend inside the restroom while he takes a dump thinking he's preparing for an assasination plot.  That's just great timing :)  Well, hopefully he was able to SMELL the evidence that nothing's being planned on killing the Vice President.

Overall, it was very kind of our Vice President to finish the whole activity and even dropped by to pose in our photobooth.  So there you go.  Hope you enjoyed our exciting "In-the-line-of-fire" action packed coverage and photobooth session with the DeMolays.

'Til next time.