I’ve been putting off this post for quite some time but I’ve finally managed to capture all the stuff I need for the 18th Photo Quest spearheaded by Flip of Heresomewhere. I’m proud to say that I’m the first Filipino (even the first Asian!) to participate in this project.

The idea is to photograph five ordinary objects that most people will easily find and then post them in our respective blogs. We then submit our links to Flip, who lists all the participants and provides the permalinks where we can view their submissions. At the end of the month, the links to the old quest will be moved to the Photo Quest Archive, which Flip calls the "sanctuary of the common." Poetic isn’t it?

I learned about this while blog surfing (in blog Explosion, as I recall) and I came across Anna’s blog which talked about it in passing. I emailed her and she gave me a link to Flip’s site, and I was instantly hooked. Getting to see mundane objects being highlighted in a game played across the world through blogs is quite refreshing and gives a new perspective in viewing the everyday things around me.

Our assignment for this month was to photograph something I’ve collected, a flag, something I’ve grown, a shoeshelf and a tree stump.

I’ve had my postcard collection for years and it was fun browsing through all 250+ of them to select the ones to photograph.

Since we live near Malacanang, the seat of power of the Philippines, I decided to photograph some flags I found there. There’s a whole row of Philippine flags and it took me a while to photograph one since I was waiting for the breeze to unfurl it completely. Here are two images for you:

I don’t have a green thumb and I don’t have much time to try gardening so I decided to photograph a gumamela (scientific name: Hibiscus rosasinensis) that grew around our area.

Our shoeshelf isn’t much to look at but here it is anyway.

Finally, there aren’t any parks near us and my alma mater, UP Diliman, is full of trees but there aren’t any tree stumps there so I settled for this tree, which had its branches cut off.

Bonus pic: It’s technically not a tree stump (so is my previous picture) but I think it tells a much more fascinating story than the one above. This tree, for some reason, fell over and toppled a nearby telephone pole (I hope it didn’t ruin their phone connections).

There are my entries for the June 2005 Photo Quest. I hope you come back again to see my next batch of photographs.

Until then,

Jocie (a.k.a. Gimikera)