Opening spread for The Fort article (Photo by Lester Ledesma)

If you’re flying Jetstar Asia anytime this month of February 2012, do check out the Jetstar Magazine, the airline’s Inflight Magazine. I have a 5 page story there on the Fort on how a military encampment morphed into Manila’s playground for the trendy and hip. Accompanying the article are awesome photos from Lester Ledesma and Walter Villa. I also have a couple there on my own. Check out the pages here.

Fort page 2 (photos by Lester Ledesma)

The Fort page 3 (Photos Ferdz Decena , top and right, Walter Villa bottom-left)

last page (Photos by Walter Villa)

And if  you’re also flying Cebu Pacific Air this February do check out the Cebu Smile issue. I got an opener photo for their Bacolod feature on this issue.

Cebu Smile Bacolod

Macau on Inflight's City Guide

If you are flying Seair within the couple of months October and November. Don’t forget to check out the recent issue of Seair’s InFlight Magazine. Main feature here is Puerto Princesa. I also wrote a short article on Macau for their City Guides and featured some of my photos there.

Trail to Puerto Princesa Underground River Full page

If you’d like to take a glimpse of the issue, check the Inflight e-magazine at Issuu.

An image documentation on Forest Carbon Measurement in Nueva Vizcaya

I’ve been slowly rebuilding my galleries on my new photos page and prioritizing a lot of my works first as an opportunity to build a much decent portfolio of professional works. One project I really enjoyed working on before was the Primer on Forest and Climate Change in Nueva Vizcaya. Up now on the galleries are a few selected photos from the hundreds shot during that project. You can check the gallery here.

Save the Children Mission Postcard

I had the pleasure of working with the Philippine chapter of the worldwide NGO Save the Children a couple of years back but wasn’t able to post some details. We took several photos of schools and children where the organization had projects. What’s interesting about the work aside from interacting with the local communities is I had to shoot full Hi-res JPEGs since the client was strict about “untouched” photos and most of the children they would use for their materials need model releases from their parents. I’ve recently uploaded some of my selected photos from the hundreds I shot there. You can see them at the Save the Children Gallery.

Vision Postcard

General postcard

my new portfolio and prints section at photos.ferdzdecena.com

What’s keeping me busy these days? Vacations with relatives is one, setting up some legal stuff is another, and lately I’ve decided to keep my photo archive up there in the cloud. I realized that I need access to my hi-res archives whenever I travel for that random image request I’ve been getting. I know I can’t carry my 2 external hard drives with me all the time so I decided that online storage space would be the solution.

I’ve been looking at the different options and ended up with SmugMug for several reasons:

• Unlimited Uploads and Bandwidth with Data Canters backed by Amazon
• Lots of privacy options and password protect galleries for client or friend viewing only
• Highly customizable interface and design with custom domains
• Images are protected with right-click disabled and also optional personalized watermarks
• Easy to organize and arrange images, collections and galleries
• Easy to share on social networking sites
• The images looks good and users can choose which interface is comfortable with them
• For Pro users, I can customize the prices for printing, choose a photo lab and also price on digital downloads
• There are a lot of third-party apps like Send2Smugmug for uploading batch of images in the background aside from using the native browser upload
• The site is fast and very responsive
• Tried and tested by numerous photographers throughout the years

Send2Smugmug is an upload application for easy transfer

Getty Image invitation for 56 images

I’ve been using my Flickr for years but I thought its features aren’t enough and using Smugmug more made me realize that. But all this feature does come with a price. Smugmug isn’t free. The most Basic is US$40/year, the Power user is US$60/year and the Pro user is US$150. Not really cheap but you do get what you paid for. I know it would take a long time to have all my archives up there. It’s a slow process but I’m uploading most of the time in the background whenever my computer is open. Currently I already have 1000 images uploaded at 7gig space with some of the galleries set on private.

If you are interested to sign-up on Smugmug they have a 14-day trial period and you can use this coupon code for a US$5 off: ljWcxQyYvVD3Q

You could view my new portfolio and prints site section at photos.ferdzdecena.com

I won’t be abandoning Flickr as my photo-sharing site as I’ll use Smugmug as a photo-storage, portfolio site and selling prints and stocks. And speaking of stocks, one reason to keep my flickr account is its tie-up with Getty Images. A couple of weeks ago I received 56 images invitation to contribute to Getty. I thought this is a good opportunity to see if I could get some passive income from stock photos from them. A couple of images I may not use since it requires a “model release” and I may choose not to contribute some since I don’t like “rights” attached to the images. But let’s see where this would go. There are already 9 images approved and up for sale while I slowly upload the rest of the images for approval.

Kar Grobl at Atok (Olympus E-PL1, Lumix 20mm, f3.5, 1/640, ISO 200)

I recently had a chance to work with Humanitarian Photojournalist, Karl Grobl on their first Jim Cline Photo Tour in the Philippines. I find his knack for people photography impressive most especially that he’s a JPG shooter and his images doesn’t rely much on Post-processing. I have a short interview with Karl on Philippine Star’s Online Edition at Unblogged which I’m writing weekly for a limited time. At the interview we discussed why he chose the Philippines, his type of Photography and also some travel related stuff.

Mang Ramon (Olympus E-PL2, Lumix 20mm, f1.7, 1/25, ISO 1600, WB Auto)

I met Mang Ramon, the owner of Rita’s Inn in Batad, Ifugao while he was grinding a few betel nuts to chew in a corner by the dining area. His humble and heavily bearded appearance was deceiving as one would just ignore him as one of the elders until he speaks. His English was fluent and had stories as many as the lines in his face. Before I left Rita’s Inn, probably the oldest inn in Batad, he wanted me to see his Ifugao House which he inherited from his father. It was probably more than a century old. Inside the elaborate Ifugao House are his collections of antiques.

What’s more interesting at that moment was the lighting on his figure. The lighting was dim and Mang Ramon would usually sway from his position. I pushed the ISO of the Olympus PEN E-PL2 to 1600 and shot wide open at f1.7. It took several attempts until I asked him to stay still for a second and got a really sharp one. I liked this portrait as it captures the context of the subject perfectly.