ComDev – Taking Photographs Is Important. So Is Taking Care Of Them

Photographs are not only important in what I do – which is communication for development (ComDev) – they are necessary. You cannot communicate development without photographs!

Today, Friday, 16 April 2021, after about 3 hours, I finalized assigning to folders by subject matter my 21-year collection of digital photographs totaling 16,500 plus. In ComDev, which I invented in 1980, a creative writer must be a photographer himself.

Now, do you necessarily intently study how to compose each shot in taking a picture? Not if you have a digital camera like mine – Lumix FZ100  with Intelligent Auto (IA) – you just point and shoot. What about lighting and focus and speed? The IA takes care of all those. I bought my camera for P19K cash early 2012, and it’s still good. (In any case, it paid for itself immediately because I had a one-man contract to produce a coffee-table book – write, edit, take more photographs, do the layout up to desktop publishing next to commercial printing. That was the coffee-table book The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable to celebrate the Silver Anniversary of the Agricultural Credit Policy Council (ACPC); that was when Jovita Corpuz was Executive Director of ACPC. About 90% of the text was mine; half the number of the images of that 144-page book also mine. The book’s total budget? P1M. Photography is joyful in more ways than one!

Meanwhile, on my Windows 10 background slideshow, I’m watching the changing of scenes on 2 screens: my Lenovo ThinkPad laptop, 14-inch screen, side by side with my external monitor ViewSonic, 20-inch screen. Both screens full photographs on close-ups, all those images mine. Enjoy!

Photography is a talent I began to add in 1975, when I was Editor In Chief of the 3 publications of the Forest Research Institute (FORI): monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat, which I patterned after the American National Geographic. My team visited many places in the Philippines to collect images for those stories, articles and papers. In-between takes, I asked my FORI photographer about photography, and he was not selfish with his knowledge and experience. Later, I myself studied photography by reading pamphlets – and studying the great paintings of the old European masters for their composition, foreground, background, and “lighting” (highlights). Did anyone tell me to do that? I did.

(Note that I am self-taught as a creative writer, editor and layout artist in the old-fashioned way, from 1965 to 1985. On Innocents Day 1985, I began to teach myself digital writing (word processing) with WordStar v1. In 1987 or thereabouts, I began teaching myself Microsoft Wordv1; through the years Microsoft Officetaught me desktop publishing, including formatting and layouting of images, pages etcetera.)

I now have in a holding folder Photos Much, 17 subfolders of photographs, by name: Albay Mayon, Asingan, Church, Farm & Home, Hilario Family, Los Baños, Malvar Organics, Miscellaneous, My Room & Me, Native Animals Summit, PhilRice UPLB, Reunions, Rice & Rice, Rural Views, UPLB Campus, Villa De Acuzar, and Windows Collage.

Loving it all!@517