Photography Workshop in St Scho

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Cat and I had the pleasure of doing a photography workshop as part of these senior high students’ Visual Arts program.  Great fun! It’s such a pleasure to discover that some of these young people have an eye for making images, and as their teacher Louise Arnaldo told me, quite a few of them are planning to enter Fine Arts when they graduate.  Maybe some of them will become photographers too.

Cat and I seem to have found our niche, which jives in perfectly with what I do for Kodak here: acting as a bridge for people who’re interested in photography but are still using point-n-shoot cameras.  I have to say that some of the best photos that came out of this workshop were taken with point-n-shoots.  You may not have too many options, but they’re still a lot more than the Kodak Brownies and Instamatics photogs of my generation started with! It really all boils down to seeing light and excluding whatever doesn’t belong.

Great work, girls – no, make that great work, ladies!

Are Saltwater Aquariums Bad for the Environment?

Sunday, September 13, 2009

I used to be an enthusiastic aquarist, and only the lack of space where I live now is keeping me from starting a new one.  But ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of having a saltwater aquarium; having grown up going to Puerto Galera every summer, I wanted to bring back a piece of that wonderful ocean experience with me. Turns out it may have been a good thing I never did get one.

Why? Well, I was wondering about this magnificent dragon-like fish, the ribbon eel, and in researching it, found some disturbing facts.  I was wondering what had happened to this fish, as I used to see a lot of them in aquariums in the 70’s and 80’s, but now I don’t; and I used to see them in Batangas when we’d go snorkeling there, and up to now I’ve yet to see one again in Anilao. Last time I saw a ribbon eel in the wild was in Bauan, off the El Capitan resort (now Divers’ Sanctuary), back in 1994.

Have they gotten scarcer? Have they simply lost popularity with aquarium keepers? Or worse – have they been overfished?

The latter may just be the answer. Up to now, most saltwater fish are sourced from the wild, unlike freshwater aquarium fish which now come from farms. Government officials will usually say this is good for the fishing communities, as it gives the fishermen an additional source of livelihood; but on the other hand it encourages destructive practices such as using cyanide to stun the fish (killing other organisms in the area), and overfishing the sensitive reef habitats.  (Here’s another article on cyanide fishing, this one focusing on the Hong Kong food market, and another from Australia, on why it’s a bad idea to buy cyanided fish.).

If you’ve ever gone snorkeling or diving, you’ll notice that some of the most beautiful fish are only seen in ones and twos, scattered across the reef.  In other words, there aren’t too many of those species on any one reef. Giving fishermen incentive to catch more of them – which is exactly what market forces do – can lead to unsustainable harvesting.

From an environmentalist’s point of view, a saltwater aquarium has many negatives: it encourages the destructive catching of reef fish; it adds to electrical consumption by its need for pumps, filters and lights, and in temperate regions, heating; and because some fish like the ribbon eel are very sensitive and hard to keep, fish mortality is often high.  Which in turn can drive even more buying, driving the cycle of overharvesting.

So: goodbye to my plans for a saltwater aquarium, and I’ll just use the money to get to Batangas. Where I’ll see more than I can keep in any aquarium, even if I were as rich as Henry Sy.  And when I do get space for a new aquarium, I’ll be happy to stock it with gouramis.

Encyclopedia of Earth

Saturday, September 12, 2009

A nice handy reference on the environment at http://www.eoearth.org/. Found it while browsing for info on Crown of Thorns Starfish, which I saw way too many of in Zambales last May.  Just hoping the troublesome buggers won’t be too numerous in Anilao …

Looking Forward to ICC 2009 in Anilao

It’s that time of year again when we take the beaches – to clean up after the more witless members of our obstinate species. It’s International Coastal Cleanup Day coming up, and this time it falls on a long weekend. Why is the ICC so important? Just look at this picture below:

Better yet, click on it (Nat Geo story on the Eastern Pacific Garbage Vortex).  This trash is just part of the great Sargasso Sea of debris floating practically right outside our backdoor. We’ll never be able to get it all – but if we can at least reduce the amount of additional waste that’s going there, it’ll help.  Help save our reefs, fish, turtles, seabirds – and let’s not forget, our fishermen and anyone who likes to eat fish.  And I happen to be partial to my tuna belly.

So it’s off to join the Scubasureros – and if I can’t dive on the day, I can at least cover the event, then snorkel after. I’m looking forward to another fun day, this time at Anilao with Cat and Cat’s sister Arlene.  With luck Cat’s new diving choirmates Jon and Jong will join us, and we can stay overnight for the long weekend. Not sure yet whether we’ll be there on the 19th or 20th though.

And not sure yet if the weather will cooperate! Last year’s ICC turned out nice and sunny despite a leadup of rain over the days previous, but this year has been the wettest September I can remember.

Mutton Rogan Josh @ New Bombay

It’s a bad thing when I leave home without a proper breakfast, if you ask my wife Cat. Because when I do it, I get ravenous – and we can end up a spending quite a bit eating out. But I was not to be denied, as I’d just finished an article and fixing my computer in an all-nighter, had a major meat craving, and I knew the original branch of New Bombay was literally a hop skip and jump away from our meeting.

So we end our meeting late in the afternoon, and I tell Cat I’m hungry.  We wrangle over where to eat, then I pop my secret weapon – the word “kabab.”  Instant yes!  

Well, we didn’t order kabab as originally intended, as I got fixated on the mutton rogan josh while Cat went for a dish of paneer tikka. I ordered chapatis to go with it, which in hindsight was a mistake – hungry as I was, rice would’ve been more filling.

But the food was incredible – never mind that New Bombay at De La Costa looks rather dingy, the food is real North Indian and there’s no cuisine I like better! The mutton was very flavorful, and there was a nice added crunch from the generous amount of chopped almonds thrown in. The only complaint I had with it was the presence of many small sharp bones – the price I guess of eating the bonier cuts of mutton.  The paneer tikka was also great, especially with coriander chutney as dip.  Hungry as I was, I ended up ordering a side of samosas too – and again, those were great. Definitely eating there again!

Epilogue: got to chatting with my old friend Vimla, and she’s a fan of the rogan josh and korma mixes from Santi’s, and she gets her yogurt supply from New Bombay itself.  Gotta try those!

The Magnetic Mountain Points Home

Among the tales that captured my imagination in childhood, the maritime adventures from the Arabian Nights stand out as among the most inspiring.  They fed my love of the sea and my eternal craving for sensawunda, and they still do til now.  The Sea Rovers of Syrene setting is inspired by this.

Among those tales, one of the most fascinating elements for me is the legend of the Magnetic Mountain, featured in the story of the Third Kalender Prince.  The Magnetic Mountain was a perilous landmark for sailors, for coming too near was said to draw out the iron nails from a ship causing its timbers to come apart.  Only when the Kalender Prince shot down an idol of a rider in brass with a bow of brass and lead arrows did the menace come to an end.

Now I’ve always known that many of the Arabian Nights voyages were to Southeast Asian waters, but little did I know how close to home this legend was to bring me.  When doing my research for Syrene I came to the conclusion that the Magnetic Mountain story was a fantastic justification for Indo-Arabian ship construction vs. Western and Chinese, the former having hulls ‘sewn’ together with rope while the latter used iron nails.  Ships of this ‘sewn’ construction were apparently better at surviving going aground or colliding with submerged reefs, always a danger in the shallow tropical seas where the Arab mariners traded. The flexible sewn timbers would bend and spring back, while rigidly nailed timbers would shatter.

This was the conclusion of James Taylor in his article for the British Yemeni Society:

According to al-Jahiz, in the last decade of the 7th century CE, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ath-Thaqafi, the iron handed Marwanid viceroy of Iraq, tried to introduce flat-bottomed, nailed ships like those of the Mediterranean to the waters of the Arabian Gulf. The experiment failed because experience had taught Arab seamen that the ships they were used to, in which the planks were fastened together with coir ropes and daubed with grease, were better equipped to withstand the frequent groundings and collisions with the sandbanks and submerged reefs that abound in the inshore waters of the Red Sea and the Gulf.

But what of the specific landmark, and the action of shooting at something to dispel the evil?  I found this blog post only yesterday, and it was an eye-opener.  Apparently there were indeed  seamounts in the Philippine archipelago where magnetic anomalies caused compasses to go wild, and rough water nearby spelled fatal danger for any ship that made a navigational error here.  As Spanish historian Pedro Chirino relates:

In the island of Mindanao between La Canela and the river, a great promontory projects from a rugged and steep coast; always at these points there is a heavy sea, making it both difficult and dangerous to double them. When passing by this headland, the natives, as it was so steep, offered their arrows, discharging them with such force that they penetrated the rock itself. This they did as a sacrifice, that a safe passage might be accorded them

Compare this to the Arabian Nights version:

On hearing this the pilot grew white, and, beating his breast, he cried, "Oh, sir, we are lost, lost!" till the ship's crew trembled at they knew not what. When he had recovered himself a little, and was able to explain the cause of his terror, he replied, in answer to my question, that we had drifted far out of our course, and that the following day about noon we should come near that mass of darkness, which, said he, is nothing but the famous Black Mountain. This mountain is composed of adamant, which attracts to itself all the iron and nails in your ship; and as we are helplessly drawn nearer, the force of attraction will become so great that the iron and nails will fall out of the ships and cling to the mountain, and the ships will sink to the bottom with all that are in them. This it is that causes the side of the mountain towards the sea to appear of such a dense blackness (Lang 1898, 102-3).

The prince then dreams that he must dig up a brass bow and arrows, and shoot down a brass horseman that is on top of the mountain.  If you account for the story becoming distorted in the telling, with the act of shooting at the mountain becoming an attack on its guardian instead of a propitiatory offering, this jives perfectly with Chirino’s account. 

A legend more than a thousand years old, that first came to me through the Arabian Nights, now revealed to come from practically just outside my door.  How’s that for inspiring a sense of wonder!

Note: the blog of Paul Manansala, a Filipino researcher, has many interesting articles on the ancient Philippines and its maritime links with the rest of Asia.  Very interesting reading!

Celebrate the Sea 2009

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The long weekend of June 12-14 was a blast (save for Saturday, which I spent sick dangit), as Cat and I got to attend Celebrate the Sea 2009 and meet one of my personal heroes in photography and exploration.  I’m talking about David Doubilet, whose photos in National Geo have been inspiring me since I was in high school. 

I’ve also gained some new inspirations: Michael AW, another celebrated underwater photographer and author of Heart of the Ocean, a book photographed entirely in Philippine waters; Peter Scoones, cinematographer of the ground-breaking Blue Planet BBC series; Lynn Funkhouser, whose beautiful shots reassured me Puerto Galera where I spent so many great summers is still as beautiful underwater as I remember it; Joe Moreira, the uber-cool managing editor of Ocean Geographic; and our own Undersecretary Cynthia Carrion, who’s very active in environmental preservation.

Cat and I got to view some really awesome films and presentations, and sit in on some thought-provoking forums on current environmental problems.  I missed one forum on Saturday, though, that I had really wanted to attend – a debate on whether oceanariums are beneficial for the environment or not.  Cat and I got to sit in though on a forum on ‘changing the face of terror,’ Michael AW’s advocacy to reform the image of the shark, which interestingly morphed into a discussion of the dynamics between environmentalism and deeply entrenched Asian cultures (specifically, the Chinese appetite for sharks’ fin soup). 

The presentation I enjoyed the most was Doubilet’s talk on his evolution as a National Geographic underwater photographer, where he kinda let us into his head and showed how he learned to see as an underwater image-maker.  Very fittingly, Doubilet noted that light is still the first and most important ingredient to his vision, and talked about how he learned to shoot underwater using available light and monochrome film.  Now B/W and underwater don’t often get associated together, because most underwater shots nowadays are all about the psychedelic colors of reef life; but Doubilet’s shots really illustrated how you can get stunning visuals from shafts of light and the way water refracts and diffuses light.  (I think I’m gonna end up grabbing that second hand Nikonos I saw downtown next payday …)