Photographer, freelance journalist Bobby Timonera

Fiesta sa Mindanao exhibit ko sa CCP, Feb. 2004. Taken by Arnel Macariola.

Bobby Timonera is a freelance journalist, doing both writing and photography. He worked as a staff reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer in Manila from 1992-97, then joined its Mindanao Bureau when he and his family went home to Iligan City in the summer of 1997. Maybe boredom while covering the Senate in 1996-97 also hastened his decision to go home. In 2001, he helped form MindaNews, a cooperative of Mindanao-based journalists where he is now one of the editors.

Bobby taught himself photography in his senior year in college, relying on borrowed photography books and magazines when there was no Internet yet. A friend’s 17-volume Life’s Library of Photography became his bible as he spent his little income from journalism into buying camera and darkroom equipment, film and photo paper. He did almost exclusively black-and-white back then, urging his parents to give up their bathroom in their bedroom so he could build his makeshift darkroom.

Bobby delved into journalism right after college (starting in 1987), writing about and photographing the turmoil in Mindanao. But photography had to take a back seat when he and his family moved to Manila in 1992 as he was hired by the Inquirer as a news reporter. He resumed taking pictures only upon returning home in 1997. He continued writing for the Inquirer (for its Mindanao bureau) until 2001. He covered the war with the MILF in March-June 2000, which ignited in the neighboring town of Kauswagan, Lanao del Norte, some 20 minutes away from home.

He’s been contributing features and photographs every now and then to some publications, among them PAL’s Mabuhay Magazine, Cebu Pacific’s Smiles, Business World Online, Newsbreak magazine, the defunct BusinessDay, also the erstwhile AsiaWeek.

Bobby did his first photo exhibit (all black-and-white) way back in 1988 (“Lanao: People & Events”). His other one-man exhibits include “Fiesta sa Mindanao” (Iligan in Sept. 2003 and in Mindanao cities like Davao, General Santos and Koronadal a few months after, and also exhibited at the Cultural Center in February 2004); “PixelPerfect” (Iligan, Sept. 2002, his first venture into digital photography); and “Pitbulls are Ferocious Dogs” (Sept. 2006, featuring the family pet Padfoot, an American Pitbull Terrier).

Bobby just published his first photo book titled “Fiesta sa Mindanao!” which started out as a year-long assignment for BusinessWorld Online’s MobileMedia project in 2003. He continued shooting Mindanao festivals even after his contract with BusinessWorld ended. He used the print-on-demand technology of www.lulu.com, a company based in the United States, for the book. Fiesta sa Mindanao is available for purchase online at http://www.lulu.com/content/518604.

My fav photo, old B&W shot I took in the late ’80s, couldn’t remember exactly when.

I was learning photography on my own then, with a tight budget, with almost nobody to help me out. The cheapest way for me to learn photogrpahy was to go the b&w route. It was and still is expensive if you shoot b&w film and rely on the labs for processing/printing. But if you do it all your own, it’s actually cheap. Cheap for me coz I wasn’t after the best films nor the best paper; I made do with what’s available locally here, and what I can afford. So for film, it was Necopan, the cheapest you can find, but I got it even cheaper when I had the chance to buy 100ft bulk rolls in Hidalgo. Paper, it’s the Chinese-made Era, mostly single weight. So it was that I was sooo poor (a promdi journalist is poorly paid, until now), but this didn’t hinder me from learning photography. I was using the Atlas universal film/paper developer, and Atlas fixer, which were really much much cheap than their Kodak equivalent.

I do like this photo coz it involved a lot of thinking before I took the shot. There were these street kids sleeping by the sidewalk. Taking a closeup shot would really show details, gulagulanit na damit, kawawang mukha. But then, people may get the wrong impression that this is just one kid. To show there are many of them, I can of course move back. But then I’d lose the details, and there are compositional issues as too much blank useless space may be included in the frame. Then naglaro utak ko, ano kaya kung … ayan! Violating some rules of composition, like the basic “don’t cut body parts.” I didn’t cut just less important body parts like the limbs, but a very vital one! But the street kid is still intact. Broken, though, but just like a map of the world. Pwede mo idugtong, and you get a whole picture of the boy, and the viewer knows right away na di nag-iisa tong bata.

Maybe there’s too much contrast here, not much details in the shadows. That’s coz I was really drooling on the Tri-X at that time, coz all photojournalists I knew were using Tri-X. But I couldn’t afford it. So I had this habit of pushing the ASA100 Necopan to EI 400, extending developing time in the darkroom later. So I did get a lot of contrasty images then, coz even in broad daylight, I usually just set my camera at EI400 for the Necopan.

You can see more of Bobby Timonera’s Photos at the following galleries:

Photo.net.ph
Pbase Gallery
thelandofpromise.com