When I was a kid I used to go with my aunt to do the groceries after church. We went to this grocery store called Century, which stood where a Metrobank branch now stands at the corner of Mayon and Retiro streets in Quezon City. Back then the girls at the checkout counter would enter each and every price number by number on their manual adding machines.

Now, the ladies at the supermarket checkout counters just place the product bar code tag under a reader and that’s it, the purchases are computed and the total bill is arrived at in a lot less time than it takes us to shop.

And then there was that text message that went around a few months back, of how Filipinos were to be tagged like grocery items, identifiable whenever we passed through a scanner. Big brotherish, I say, but that message scared the heck out of a lot of people.

USB drives are a good giveaway items these days, because almost everyone has some sort of use for it, whether they have a computer at home or not. Especially useful are those USB drives I’ve seen that are shaped and can be worn like bracelets.

The food was good too.

However I thought that for my next food / product shoot my makeshift lightbox will not do — it was huge and falling apart at the corners. Not very good for a client to see, I thought, so off I went to the Internet again to look at other ways of building a mini-studio.

I found very easy to follow steps here: http://www.pbase.com/wlhuber/light_box_light_tent

However, as with most of the blogs that I saw from either Europe or North America, they used white color PVC, which was not available at Ace Hardware. I could have sourced white pvc pipes from a dedicated construction/builders store but they would have cost around 10x as much as the blue pvc pipes which would no longer be in the “cheap” budget.

I spoke on the phone with MOA Ace Hardware’s Nickson, who very helpfully and patiently took me through pricing on the items I needed, and who also confirmed that they can cut the lengths that I wanted for me at no extra charge.

I had also considered painting the pipes white, but then I would need two cans of spray paint for that, a primer and the actual white coating. A can of spray paint is somewhere between P140 – P180 so I decided to hold off on that unless I find that the blue pvc would have a marked color cast on the end results.

Total cost: P286

I didn’t even bother to use my second roll of tracing paper. I just cut off the ones from the “windows” on my old box and taped them to the side bars of the pvc studio.

And here’s the setup:

And the results:

Shots were taken around 11pm last night with no other lights except the ones on the side, and a speed light. I didn’t put on the top light for these shots. No PP or any levels adjustments either, just resize and post.

I don’t think the pvc needs to be painted white, though. What do you think?

The PLDT installers were at the house today, to hook us up to PLDT’s landline plus DSL plan 990. We thought it was about time to say goodbye to SmartBRO after three years. No complaints about speed and service, but PHP 999 for DSL alone is no match for PHP 990 for DSL and Landline.

Right now our SmartBRO is still hooked up to the router and then to the wireless access point, with the PLDT plugged into the desktop alone. This means I can still sit in the outdoor cushions while checking my Facebook account and uploading photos to my online albums.

But come Monday I will go to the nearest Smart Wireless Center and start saying goodbye to my SmartBRO antenna. It was nice knowing you.