At Boracay, Mylene Dizon for Bare Magazine
Bare Magazine
Art Director Luis Espiritu
Styling and Make-up Chechel Joson
Model Mylene Dizon
Photography Tommy Zablan
If I were to imagine my own personal version of J. M. Barrie’s (he authored Peter Pan) Never Never Land, this would be it. Our location was the Shangri-la Hotel, in Boracay, Philippines. It’s a castle by the sea in one of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. The beach itself is lined with bars, restaurants, clubs, and massage parlors.
To get there from Manila in the morning, we had to take a plane, a tricycle, and a boat ride and arrived in the early afternoon. I originally pitched that we were to shoot at dusk, however, Luis Espiritu, the Art Director, thought it would be interesting to shoot at night. So a night shoot it was to be. It didn’t matter, when it comes to photography – I own the night. 
It’s difficult for city dwellers to comprehend how dark a secluded beach on a cloudy night can be – without any artificial light sources. It’s totally black. Thankfully we were armed with cigarette lighters and a Hensel Porty power pack. I changed lenses by the light of my cigarette lighter and would ask my assistant to momentarily switch on the modelling lights of the Porty in order to direct, compose, and focus, and take a few frames, and then ask him to switch it off after a short period to conserve the battery.
Had a fisherman on a boat been spying on our shoot, I’d imagine it was a surreal combination of blinding flashes where he would catch glimpses of a half-naked actress rolling around on the beach for a few milliseconds, mixed with moments of total darkness as our flashes took out his night vision by forcing his irises to close.
But then, actress Mylene Dizon dressed in these swimsuits is incredibly easy on the eyes. So it evens out.
It doesn’t look like it in these images, but I spent a lot of time in this shoot in the water. The tide was high that evening, and when the waves would come crashing in, I’d be drenched right up to my chest. My camera at the time, a Kodak DCS-760, required an external battery to function for any significant amount of time, and I found that I had to pin the rather large battery pack (a Digital Camera Battery or DCB 30) on my shirt collar to prevent it from getting shorted out.
Looking back, it would seem almost foolish to carry more than $8000 in equipment while waist deep in sea water, getting hit by waves, trying to feel my way around the sand in total darkness. But then…a photograph is forever.
