christmas cheers!

A very merry Christmas everyone!

photographing photographers

How do you make portraits of professional photographers? The thought of matching wits with them on making the lighting perfect and setting your cameras to the most foolproof priorities is enough to give one a creak on the neck. That's probably how one would feel when surrounded by the world's top contemporary photographers like last week during the Angkor Photography Festival here.

We had a chance to hang out with the six photographers from the Philippines attending the festival and who are also vying for the festival's top prize - $1,300 cash and a chance to publish their winning photos to the Paris Match Magazine.

While throwing a party for them in the house, we thought of giving them a dose of their own medicine through photographs we probably would never want to have... mugshots!


Charles is a commercial photographer who works for an ad agency in Manila. He literally slept his way to the festival and is perhaps a walking irony for coffee ads. His affairs on the mats made him notorious here.


Carla is a fierce fashion photographer who does editorials for glossies in the Philippines. Well remembered for her emotional spells throughout the festival.


Akira Liwanag made history in the festival as the youngest photographer ever to qualify for a spot in the festival. At seventeen years old and still in high school, this kid who has barely gotten past his puberty is years beyond his age and is amazing with the lens.


Former London resident Sarah Encabo returned to the Philippines to further pursue her passion for photography and is now with Manila Times.


John is this festival's Romeo - breaking the hearts of countless Indian photographers during the festival with his wild antics. This shutterbug is the ultimate pro - on the roll with Reuters, which just happens to be the biggest news agency in the universe.


Candice is perhaps the most socially-relevant photographer in the group who believes that a photo is powerful enough to instill change. But that doesn't mean she can't be the wackiest as well!


Although not part of the festival, Vincent is a shutterbug who can give any Magnum photographer a run for their money.


Don is an avant garde photographer armed with nothing but a camera phone... but beware... his images are as potent as a Nikon D3X could deliver!


The gang before the storm... they are probably all back in the Philippines as of writing while Don, Vincent and I are left back here in the eye of a cyclonic week of countless photoshoots, editing, meetings, and endless work!

helluvaweek!

High season has officially cast its blessed spell in sleepy Siem Reap and hopefully, all of Cambodia. Proof of this is the fact that I haven’t touched my blog in a week or even read any blogs at all! It started late last week with a photoshoot at a new boutique hotel that's opening soon - The Sothea.


Aside from the shoot, we are doing all of their marketing collaterals and promotions. This is a tough one since my client is actually my wife who is Senior Sales Manager of the hotel, so there is definitely no escaping this one! This shoot is for her sales trip to Australia in the next few weeks.


It's also the start of the 4th annual Angkor Photo Festival which brings in the best photographers around the world for a weeklong festival and series of exhibitions around. This year, I was helping out with two galleries - the McDermott Gallery with their marketing collaterals and the Friends Center Gallery of which my team handled a handful of things for - from the interior design to the marketing and even the installation of the new exhibition. The new artist featured here is Steve McCurry, whose portrait of "the Afghan Girl" is the most recognizable photograph in the history of National Geographic.

A team of six young Filipino photographers are also present to represent the country and we are making sure that they feel at home here!



We are also married to our cameras these past few days (and for the next weeks to come!) with a series of more photoshoots along the way. Yesterday, we did a wedding shoot for a Japanese couple at the Orient Express hotel. With shoots on the temples and a full day affair to cover, it was a back-breaking work.

We have two more hotels next week due for a shoot and a couple more weddings and corporate events to cover.


The Spoolworks photography team - Brewster, Kristian and Vincent. I don't think I will ever survive this season without them... and more so keep up with blogging!

It was definitely a tough week and more so in the next weeks to come. I now miss the times when I could linger longer in the office ogling though everyone's blogs or messing with mine. With my hard drive crashing down to oblivion last week, I also have to work double time to redo those lost files. These are definitely the times when you wish that there are 48 hours in a day!

So if I haven't updated my blog in the next three months, I hope blogger doesn't give up on me and delete my blog for good...

fashion calls...

A new photographer from the Philippines - Vincent, has recently joined our SPOOLWORKS team straight from Olongapo to help me out with my photography projects for the high season. So we were out to test his skills and also to shoot the latest collection of designer friend Don Protasio who recently showed at the Philippine Fashion Week. Don was lucky enough to find a great model - Holly Grabareck who hails from Singapore. She is part Chinese, American and Polish but was born and bred in the island state. Models don't get more exotic than her!

We have been looking for a place to house Don's collections apart from our gallery, but after some frustrating attempts, we have decided to renovate the second floor of our house as both a studio for me and Don where we could welcome clients but by appointment only.

This shoot is actually for a brochure we are doing for him...

Don's black and white pieces layered on a symphony of jersey, cotton and knits...

These are part of Don's classic line but as of the moment, we are experimenting on printing our own designs on his fabrics for the next season...

Don's hottest pieces are actually the shoes. These gladiator shoes he designed are selling like crazy online and at the One Gallery. These are made here in Cambodia.

Don is cooking up a fashion show next month here in Siem Reap together with Madagascaran designer Eric Raisina who supplies fabrics for Christian Lacroix and Yves Saint Laurent in Paris...

Don sells his collections exclusively at the One Gallery in Siem Reap, Cambodia and at Backstage at Serendra in Manila, Philippines.

photos by Loven Ramos & Vincent Rufo

make up by Faith Famoso Ramos

model: Holly Grabareck
The team including Brewster Bonifacio and Kaoru Sato

shot on location at Friends Center, Siem Reap Cambodia

a series of unfortunate (and fortunate) events

I don't know what on earth is happening, but this has been a weird day. It's started like any typical Sunday with us going to church and having our usual Sunday lunch with family and Filipino friends... but when I came back to the office to doodle a bit with some work and do some blogging updates, I couldn't boot my black macbook anymore... tried all sorts of things and what nots, but nothing happened. My black mac is officially dead after more than a year's worth of service... I just renovated the office into an all-white affair, so could it be that it felt out of place??? Do I need to get myself a white macbook as well?!

The sad thing is, I haven't backed up my files for the last 3 months since returning from Beijing. All those months worth of work - from ad campaigns, to corporate identities and a whole bunch of design work. Luckily, I saved most of my photos in our 500 gb network drive. But 3 months worth of work is still beyond repair... and I have a million deadlines to catch by tomorrow!

And it doesn't end there. After the misfortune, we decided to go out and do some vintage shopping (read:ukay) but as we reached our shopping haunt, the car overheated extremely that I thought somebody was cooking steamed buns in my hood! I was still able to drive the car to the car shop but they told me it's a lot of work so it's gonna take around 2 - 3 days to get the work done.

Great! So I don't have a car. I lost my macbook. What else could go wrong?

As I was walking out of the shop, the heavens poured so I was stuck there without a ride... and I have a meeting in 15 minutes! Yup, a meeting on a Sunday, and I'm stuck in the rain!

Well, I did make it late and all, but just as I thought that I'm gonna be totally bombed out the whole day, I got a call from the gallery.

I sold five artworks!

And losing things that I was totally dependent upon meant I began to look at life differently again... I took a tuktuk going home and I was able to see my neighborhood again in a brand new level. When I'm driving the car, I always looked straight.

When I still have my macbook, I was working like crazy - even on Sundays. Today, I was able to teach my 3-year old son Freedom how to paint for the first time...

if i married singapore...

If you were a city, what would you be?

If there is a place that best represents your ideals, your aspirations, your personality, your deepest thoughts and longings, which place would reveal your true self?

For my wife, she can only be Singapore...


Asked why, of all the places on earth she's been to would she choose Singapore, a tiny island state which was a bastion of British trade in the colonial days, her definition is simple - she loves ORDER.


Like the city, my wife is a neat and a control freak. The kind of person who color codes all her reports in post-its, who arranges CDs alphabetically and zones things in any way imaginable.

Everytime I drive through Changi Airport to the city itself, I am amazed how even the bougainvilleas on the plantboxes by the freeway look like they have been ordered by the government to exude the same shade of pinkish purple that is almost crazily the same everywhere. The streets, the subways, the signs... they are all pristinely accurate, planned and placed to a tee as if they know the answers before you even ask for directions!


An amalgam of the west and the east, the past and the present, Singapore is a city of contrasts, of parodies, of ironies, of yin and yang colliding in a beautiful frenzy.

A perfect representation of my wife. Ask her what she wants for Christmas and you'll lose your mind.



Always hot, sexy and voluptouos, but that warmth she exudes is her biggest draw...


Her personailty is as colorful as a peacock gracefully hopping on the beaches of Sentosa...

A beacon of a hundred lights, Singapore and my wife can light up a path in the darkest corners of life's chapters...

She is very cosmopolitan... a city who is moving forward in every direction and urbanizes faster than our credit card can catch. Coincidentally, shopping is also the national past time of Singapore, which is also the full time profession of my wife.

Glitzy, boisterous, flashy and opulent, Singapore snags herself like a woman who has reached a certain level of sophistication that not everyone can understand but everyone wants to become...

Ruled by rules, controlled by controls... best of all, Singapore is such a "fine" city...

water of life

Cambodia is home to Southeast Asia's biggest lake - Tonle Sap which for many Khmers, represents the lifeblood of the country. On its ebbing tides was forged one of the world's greatest empires - Angkor.


More than a thousand years later, life still goes on and living still exists on its waters. I have been fervently visiting the lake but am still mesmerized by its vastness and silent power... and more importantly, how the people have managed to survive it.

The most recognizable part of the lake to the outside world is the floating village of Chong Kneas...


Most of the homes here are floating, which means they are built on boats or on barges - making it easy for dwellers to transfer their homes wherever they want. Now who will ever evict you?


Shopping is also very mobile - why go to the market when the market can go to you? Now if only H&M's Comme des Garcons is peddled this way!

Here, only two things are essential - a sturdy pair of legs and a spool of courage to brave the unpredictable waters...

Friendships can be forged on water...

or on land...

Make your way to school or the school makes way for you (at the end of the day, the floating school brings its students home! No kidding!)...

Fancy a game of basketball on a floating gym? Now let's see if Kobe Bryant can still make a dunk while being seasick!

Waiting for the day's catch...

...sometimes, the waiting pays...

...but some simply wait... and wait... and wait...

The lake and its shores are throbbing with lost souls finding directions...

and its young souls...

...eager to find life's answers...

Here, one is surrounded by water, but thirst is still enevitable.

But for those who thirst spiritually, the floating karaoke church (a former karaoke pub converted into a catholic church!) is a good place to quench your souls...

designing the divine

I had the chance to bring my back my passion for sculpture and installation art when I was invited by the Arts Lounge - one of Cambodia's largest and most progressive art spaces at the Hotel de la Paix to exhibit a couple months ago.

The exhibit was with another artist - a Cambodian named Koun Sothea - and was apltly titled Designing the Divine - as we both tackled our interpreatitons of Buddhism as a religion and as a universal culture. Sothea explored Buddhism more personally as it was his religion and he did it through color-rich oil paintings.

Mine was more of a discovery of Buddhism and how I relate to it as a Christian or as an outsider to this faith. I did it through sculptures and installations made of different materials like welded metal, cutlery, found objects, wires, manila hemp, plastic, paper, and whole load of things my kitchen and my stockrooms yielded (coupled with several trips to the local market!).

My work was more so an antithesis of divinity - wherein it represents things, ideals and beliefs that we should sacrifice and let go of - in order for us to attain real enlightenment...

This was the first piece bought from my series which tackles our search for eternal life, how to stop time and live forever - hence the clocks and the elements of time. It is that fervent search for ways to stop time that sometimes forbids us from making the most out of our lives...

See how you interpret Designing the Divine through my other pieces...

It's funny to note that I wasn't originally part of the exhibit, but the idea came up last minute from Hotel de la Paix General Manager Nick to invite me for the show.

So given the concept and such a limited time to put things together (barely three weeks!), I got back to the studio right away and started working non stop (stopping only to eat or catch some winks!) until I got this through.

The morning before the exhibition opening, I thought that my final piece wasn't working, so I went around to look for a second hand mannequin and created "Desire".

This installation was featured in the last issue of Fah Thai Magazine...

The crowd during the exhibition...

The unveiling began with the lights off and the gentle humming of my friend Jessie and poetry readings by my friend Kristian. The show was curated by another friend, Don Protasio.

I don't think I could do a show as rushed as this ever again! All of my clients almost threatened to deport me as I had to shut down my entire world to dedicate my heart to this. I love the intensity of pouring your entire energy to one particular vision, but balancing it together with a business and work is truly a tough challenge...

*exhibition photos by John McDermott