28 August 2005

The very first picture on this page doesn’t belong here, it doesn’t really have a place it belongs as it was the only picture taken on that day, but it was too nice not to put it somewhere. If you look closely you can see a date imprinted on it and if you care to squint to see it you will notice that the date isn’t very close to the rest of the pictures. But it was on the same role of film so its here anyways. That said I started off today in the afternoon just needing to get out again. Didn’t really know what I wanted to do or what to photograph so I just sort of meandered around. As I was meandering I saw a couple of Filipino men gathering coconuts and wanted to see just how they went about doing it. So I stopped for a while to watch them and asked if they minded if I took pictures. They said they didn’t, and the elderly gentlemen grabbed one of the coconuts he had just gathered and proceeded to hack one side of it open with a machete and then handed it to me to drink from. I graciously accepted, I actually was rather thirsty and so with great gust drank from the coconut spilling some on myself in the process. I hadn’t even finished the first one when he handed me a second one which I also graciously accepted. I drank the second one a bit more slowly, for one I didn’t want to appear greedy or ungrateful, and for two I didn’t really want to take any more of his coconuts as I know he was gathering them for his own use, and for three the first one had been plenty, and for four I really was making a mess of myself now. You see it seems that coconuts weren’t designed to drink from directly and it is quite hard to drink right from the husk without spilling a fair bit of it on yourself. After the coconut men I meandered a bit further down the road and came to the beach house. There I saw someone Para-surfing or what ever you might care to call it. He never quite came close enough for me to get a better photo so after about 30 minutes of waiting I decided to settle for the long distance shot and then moved on. I didn’t really come across much more that was terribly interesting to me so I figured I would try some plants. Hence the tree and the flowers, not much of a story there, they were fairly inactive and not all that entertaining, but they were very cooperative. On my way home I passed the fire station and thought that it would make some interesting pictures at night so I stopped by and asked the firemen on watch if it would be alright if I came by later that evening to take some pictures. They said it would be fine and so I went home. That evening a little after dusk I went to the fire station and with their permission began taking photos. I also took a number of photographs of them, after all what would be the purpose of photographing a firehouse without photographing the firemen. After I was finished taking pictures they wanted to get me into all there fire gear and dress me up like a fireman. Well I got no reason to refuse and it should be fun anyway so I did and, they grabbed my camera and took about 10 pictures of me. Not so many of them turned out alright, but that’s ok not so many of the ones I took turned out alright either. You may notice a couple of things when looking at the pictures of the fire station. First it seems obvious that some of them are a reddish brown. That is because of the lights used in the fire station and because I didn’t use a flash. Three of them you may notice have a more natural color, that is because I used a different kind of film. All in all it turned out to be a pretty good day and evening and I got some decent pictures