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Noelle

Formerly Slow Shutter Days. Living a slow and blurry life in Borongan City. Photography and writing by Noelle Abunda. Strongly Anti-AI.

12/09/2026

Back to regular walks after the excitement of the fiesta. I was hoping it would rain today, but the clouds just loomed over me all gloomily and I had to make do.

I came across some sharply-dressed youths at the capitolyo--apparently they're part of some tour guide association--and it turned into an impromptu photo session. There wasn't really anything else interesting going on in my walk at that moment, so I didn't mind being held hostage for a bit.

And finally, some more attempts at skate photography.

09/09/2026

Festival crowds and little moments. Quite a few people asked to have their photo taken and I'm dumping them all on this post haha.

08/09/2026

Photos of the Padul-ong Festival Parade. I tried to capture both the electric feeling of being in the crowd and the lull moments of the parade's preparation and rest. Not sure if I was quite so successful, but it was certainly a fun time.

07/09/2026

My entry for the Padul-ong Photo Contest. The Virgin Mary graces our city with her presence as men toil to keep us fed during the festivities.

06/09/2026

Photos of this year's Civic Military Parade. It was my first time covering an event as big as this, and it was quite exciting running around taking photos of subjects as kinetic as them. They certainly weren't like the marching bands of my day! They've got all sorts of kicks and jumps now. If the focal length of my lens had been any shorter, I would be in the hospital right now.

Special thanks to the ESNCHS media team for inviting me to tag along with them during the parade. I definitely couldn't have gotten as close as I have getting these shots without their help.

02/09/2026

The town fiesta is fast approaching, all those pink white and blue pennants perched on strings like so many birds, and they'll probably stay there even a month and change after the festivities end. The party only stops when you remember to.

The mood in the air was a loaded spring: so much anticipation and preparation and work, work, work; all that potential energy waiting to uncoil and burst on the day of. It'll be my first time participating as a photographer for the festival too (well, here's hoping), so I'm feeling that pressure more keenly than I have in years. I never would have expected it; September 7 and 8 were usually just days that I let pass.

So today was rather calm, with not a lot of people out. I came across some familiar faces, though, and that made my day.

28/08/2026

I wanted to get some shots of the fairgrounds before night time, but since I'm an idiot I didn't realize the peryahan itself didn't open until later. Cloudy day, too, so I took the opportunity to try some new things in the edit, mimicking the colors of slide film from the 50s. Real exciting stuff, I know.

A couple of kids who helped around at the peryahan chatted me up, and their dialect was so foreign to me that I could barely get a grip of the conversation. It made me wonder just how many towns were in the itinerary of this traveling carnival--did it span the whole island, maybe more? What was it like to grow up with a crew that was always on the move?

Well, someone else can ask these questions, preferably someone who can actually pinpoint the specific dialect of binisaya those kids spoke.

24/08/2026

Really enjoyed doing flash photography at the peryahan. Tight crowds and bright lights made for some interesting shots, and it was always funny seeing people's reactions to the flash popping like a second sun.

Quite a conspicuous style of shooting and certainly not something I would do all the time, but I felt like being a menace that night.

22/08/2026

A Plea For People to Stop Using AI to Write Their Facebook Posts

I'm against the use of generative AI for a variety of reasons--concerns ranging from ethical to environmental, all spoken by other bleeding hearts on social media that I'm sure you're tired of hearing about by now. Obviously none of these arguments are very persuasive, as people keep using AI to do their writing for them anyway.

So I'll offer another argument, one that appeals to your pride as a human being who thinks.

Writing at its very essence is the act of putting your thoughts and feelings into words; putting your words into a record, whether on paper or data, your experiences made halfway permanent. An LLM cannot see, hear, feel, nor think. So how can you trust it to accurately convey the full breadth of your experiences?

An AI doesn't know what you felt the moment you saw the sunset and clicked the shutter; because it does not have a heart nor a soul it cannot be moved by beauty. Sure, you can dictate your thoughts and feelings to your AI assistant, but all it can do is pantomime how beauty might be described. Whatever it spits out will always feel insincere because it's fundamentally just making things up.

Well, I know my words don't count for much, but I feel like I needed to say something about it anyway. And I was ill today, so I couldn't go out to take photos and post them like I usually would, so all you get is this pointless tirade, heh.

20/08/2026

Ever seen that mannequin around compre? It almost scared my friend half to death, with its blank stare and sickly grey face, like a co**se that's been embalmed wrong. I've been through this street countless times and have never seen it before yesterday; maybe the owner just put it up? If not, I wonder how many ghost stories has this grey lady spawned over the years?

It was a slow day yesterday, though, despite the minor heart attack, with barely any people out in my usual haunts. Maybe because of the news or the gloomy weather, but there just weren't a lot of moments to take.

But the baratilyos are already popping up; the peryahan already setting up rides. How fun. As I'm already in the deep-end of photography, though, all I could think about was all the photos I could take of people enjoying the fairgrounds, once everything's in full swing. Well, I could be convinced to have fun, but... where's the fun in that? Photographers are truly a strange bunch.

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