110th Filipino Independence

This event happened on June 7, 2008 at the Mira Mesa Community Park. This was a joint event put together by the Council of Philippine American Organizations of San Diego County, the Aguinaldo Foundation and Mabuhay Alliance.

Along the parade route, I took this nice picture of Rita Buencamino-Andrews, President of COPAO, with one of the Philippine Faire Beauties.



This was a very well attended event with numerous organizations participating in and around the county. Students from various schools took part in showing their pride and solidarity as well as engaging in their civic duties in helping to uplift and be involved in their community.









Darrel Issa was on hand to pay respect to the many Filipino-American World War II heroes and that really made me feel pretty good since many of our brothers, fathers, and grandfathers had served in that war and seemed to have been forgotten.



Here are a few other pictures of the event and as I mentioned, many representatives were on hand from various Filipino-American groups that I know I am neglecting in mentioning so please everyone forgive me for seemingly lacking in depth on this blog.













I just was unsure what my full capacity was at the time and had only considered volunteering in order to share my pictures and footages in the hopes that they could be used on websites and or organizational literature. I thank those that have shown their appreciation in that regard and since I have finally decided to try and establish a multi-media entity of my own, I will be more prepared in the near future to get all the information possible on the participants of future events.

Just to wrap up June's Events

Boy, just too much material to work through and it didn't help that I basically had lost a bit of will to just get things done. I suppose there are those out there that know what I am talking about.

So, my friends and I have been canvassing the county for some suitable peaks to climb. We have climbed Mount Bernardo a few times, the view is magnificent and I did have a decent panorama from an old camera but I can't seem to locate the file which doesn't bode well for my organizational skills maybe? Not! It was pretty early in on my photographic forays like 4 years ago and I have re-formatted my laptop at least 5 times since then and so it was inevitable that I would lose a picture or 2. Shouldn't happen again and I should have updated pictures of the view from Mount Bernardo soon and from my new Canon EOS 40D which is just an awesome camera.

Battle Mountain is located just across Lake Hodges from Mount Bernardo towards the southeast. In the picture, Mount Bernardo is just slightly behind me to my right.



Here it is without us out of the way, notice the evidence of last year's fire on the branches of some of the shrubs.



We climbed Battle Mountain on the morning of Father's Day before the gig at the Oceanside Amphitheatre. The plan is to film some sequences from here and then climb Mount Bernardo to do the same and basically get like a unique multi angular perspective looking across one peak to another so stay tuned for that ongoing project.

After the climb, we went to Oceanside for the Old School Father's Day concert at the Amphitheatre. Since my friend John and his crew were part of the sound crew, I got a really behind the scene access to the event. That's him to your left passionately throwing up his hood, just joking, he is a really cool guy and I thank him and his friends for hooking it up for me.



Unfortunately I couldn't stay long since I had to meet up my family for Father's Day dinner but I did get to meet and hang out with Lenny Williams formerly of Tower of Power. This guy is a legend and many hip hop artists sample is work to this day. He even gave his direct contact number and we have been talking here and there on some possible future projects next year. Those type of endeavors take a lot of hard work though so we will wait and see what happens.



Here are some pictures of the event. Notice the playa's in the house just kicking it old school style. I have a video of Lenny's soundcheck as well which should be viewed in high quality. I wish I could have stayed for the whole event when they got all decked out and really pimped out the whole show. For those that don't know, anytime there is a word in red in my post, it is a link like to a video, website, etc.











The day ended with a Father's Day dinner at Black and Blue at Valley View, pretty fancy but I am not up on all that although company like family is always good. Since it was close to my birthday, someone decided to kick in a fancy little cake? or whatever it was. Very indulgent, thanks mom and whoever helped ya with this particular surprise. It was most definitely the finest and fanciest kind of cake I have ever had.





Yet still, I am not big on splurging and or casinos but I am looking forward to hopefully covering some of the concerts and bands that are performing there in the near future if I am not all booked up especially since I hopefully will be meeting up with LL Cool J and The Game at the Anaheim Autofest in August.

Battle Mountain 4th of July 2008

July 4th 2008, Battle Mountain in Rancho Bernardo overlooking Lake Hodges was a pretty nifty idea in watching the fireworks around San Diego County. Realistically there were 3 shows that could be seen mostly in the North County obviously. The one filmed is of the show from Poway High I believe. There were about 15 people up there with us, very varied in age with even a grandmother joining her family in making the hike. Wish I had a picture of that.
The biggest incident or should I say scariest was when a tarantula was discovered scrambling about and I got a kick out of letting it crawl around on my hand while everyone else looked at it before we released it further away from where everyone was gathered.


Below are some pictures of Battle Mountain in the latter part of June when we did a few scouting runs. I hope to get some footage when there is rain and lightening in the region so stay tuned for that since some of those will be used hopefully in an upcoming short film produced by IslandSuns.