Siargao Photography, 2024
Siargao began from the air, arriving over turquoise lagoons and forested islets before dropping into a countryside of rolling green hills, a coastal village glimpsed from the water, and thatched stilt huts. Street level brought roadside sari-sari stores, a tricycle, an energetic scooter convoy down a palm-lined road, fishing boats with kids playing on the rocks, clusters of palms against blue sky, and a hermit crab caught in macro detail.
Inland, farmers led carabao past colourful houses and under dappled banana-leaf light. As the day wound down a coconut crown silhouetted against the moon gave way to Siargao's real speciality: golden hour. A crowded sunset boardwalk, silhouetted paddleboarders, a warm palm treeline reflection, a crowd with surfboards watching the sunset, a saturated cloud-burst sunset, friends on a paddleboard in golden light, a natural sunset portrait, a mountain-shaped cloud, and a surfer wheeling his board past a beachfront crowd rounded out the island's laid-back surf culture.
Lagoon mornings brought calm reflections, an environmental portrait by the water, a woman wading beside a green outrigger boat, a view towards kayaks under a palm, and a sweeping palm-plantation view over the hills. Deeper inland, dense palm canopy closed in over a green river, broken by a dock and a paddled boat for scale. A road trip past motorbikes, a twilight bungalow and a candid portrait of a couple on a boat closed out this stretch.
The trip finished among Siargao's karst islands: textured coastlines, a gateway framed between two islands, a vivid island beach, traditional boats against rocky shorelines, a cliffside lagoon house, a stilt-house resort tucked into jungle cliff, a calm symmetrical channel, colourful boats and a named local fleet, a rope swing over a cliffside pool, distant-island seascapes, candid portraits of people gazing out to sea, a red-roofed house on a green cliff, a classic white-sand cove, and, to finish, waves breaking through a rock arch.
