photo trek ii: american war cemetery

i was unable to join the first photo trek, held on the previous sunday, due to some sort of intestinal distress -- i'll leave it at that: no more details necessary. hehehe.

saturday afternoon was full of sunshine with puffy white clouds in a nice blue sky, jose commented upon the quality of light favorably. i think it had been raining sporadically the whole week, so there was the promise of that happening on the photo trek.

after lunch, i sunk a k's worth of gas (premium, as it says on the filler flap), and we left the office around 3-ish, 3 of us and 2 to follow.

not knowing precisely where the venue was (jose knew the way, but with entry from edsa to mckinley of forbes park - i was, however, keen to avoid edsa at most costs on a saturday afternoon), so prior to our departure i opted to use (again) google earth to map out a likely route.

the american war cemetery, from the vantage point of the satellites that take the google earth pictures, is a circular arrangement of roads just south of the larger arrangement of circular roads that make up the "fort" development on the former reserved lands of the fort bonifacio military reservation. that selfsame circle-within-circle road arrangement also makes the place look like an archery target from space. um. best not follow that line of thinking too far out...

therefore: slex, c5, go under first bridge, turn left, follow road to t-intersection, turn right, and turn right again at the first instance of a tall condominium complex. easy, no?

easy enough, but a potential hell on the clutch leg. slex's northbound saturday sucat/bicutan/c5 tollgate slowdown was in evidence at the time, but not so bad really. at least there were gaps in the crawling to reach the maximum 80kph limit. and the up ramp to the c5 tollgate was more manageable than the last time (a wedding in a place far far away). i virtually crawled the car up in first and had to only disengage the clutch a few times.

out of the gate, find bridge, turn left (when the rest of the driving public deigned to let me through, that is: giving way is a foreign notion to filipino motorists). snaky road with another cemetery to the left - forgot to pay attention as to what the name of the place was.

at any rate, a few turns later (and one blocked road), we came unto the venue.

...and discovered that we had just about an hour to take pictures. one semi-wrong turn later, got to the parking lot, and jose and a were out like shots, getting their picturing on.

on my end, secured car, and got myself to working the borrowed camera. all in, i was taking shots on automatic; if something caught my eye, activate camera (asa/iso pre-set to 50) and adjusted shutter speed between 1/125 to 1/500 to get a decent enough exposure per the lcd display.

not too much thinking involved... hehehe.

unfortunately, by the time the other 2 were finally near, the place's wardens(?) were shooing all the guests out for closing... so one of them took some pictures at the mini-mall we ended up eating at a dining establishment thereof (hossein's of persian kebabs).

all told, took 25 pictures. may post them later, after resizing to blog-friendly size. and it didn't rain at all. :-)