Vague, but not really.

Marina Bay, Singapura | Time-lapse from Mike Peñaranda on Vimeo.

This video just means so much to me right now. I found myself watching this video again tonight and I never - not for once, thought, that one day I'd watch this with such a heavy chest.

Mount Batulao in Batangas, my first summit.

Experiencing my first summit was surreal. Mt. Pinatubo was, as experienced trekkers would call it, a walk in the park. And the crater being your end point, there's no feeling of being on top of everything in sight. With Mt. Pulag however, due to unfavorable weather, the one hour trek to the summit was impossible. But with Mt. Batulao, my third mountain, we were blessed with good weather all throughout the night - thank You Lord for that. We were supposed to wait for the sunrise on the summit, trek early and rely solely on our head lamps, but after having our breakfast we decided to just wait for the sunrise from the camp site of Peak 7. We trekked to the summit before 7:00 AM. Which was just about right, we got there before eight - stayed for awhile and had to leave after savoring the view and of course, photo-ops. You don't really want to stay long as the sun is rising fast, unless sunburn is your thing. Haha!

2011 In Retrospect: My Videos

2011 was the year where I really rekindled my love for creating videos. I could still remember from way back my college days where I would edit clips out of my mobile phone with 3gp native file formats on Windows Movie Maker. Most of these files went down with my hard drive that crashed, so I'm pretty much left with this one video up on YouTube from 2006, shot with a Canon home video camera on standard definition. This passion for videos came back when I made this video during one of my trips back to my hometown, Surigao City. And grew even more when I acquired a Lumix fz35 camera mid-2010. Came up with a few couple of videos that year - Ilocos trip, a weekend in Laguna, our trip to Cagbalete island, and my very first time-lapse clip with mt. Makiling. Lost my mojo for the first part of 2011 but I was able to pick up when I joined this outreach program dubbed Kariton Klasrum. Join me as I journey through the year that was in retrospect through my videos. My videos in 2011 after the jump, continue reading post.