Devotees wait for the Black Nazarene during the procession at Lawton, Manila on Jan 9, 2013. Every year, millions of Filipino Catholics flock to Manila to get a glimpse of the believed miraculous figure. Photo/Mark Cristino

It’s the age of technology and everything seems to evolve really fast, including photojournalism. With everyone having a mobile phone with camera these days (not to mention DLSR’s and digicams being more affordable) anyone can be a citizen photojournalist. I never liked high-tech gadgets especially phones, the reason why is that I easily break them; good thing it doesn’t happen to my DLSR. I’m kind of scrappy person when it comes to small gadgets, I easily drop them, scratch them or once in a while loose them. So I go for the cheap rugged phones, and besides the manufacturers fool the consumers in having the latest technology only for a new version to come up next year. But here comes I-phone and Instagram, very good image quality and artsy fartsy effects, still didn’t bother getting one as fear of simply losing it some place, but I do now have a phone with picture capabilities and internet stuff, just not the high-end version.
So I brought it along the Feast of the Black Nazarene where in millions of Filipino Catholics flock to Manila to see the miraculous figure. I actually forgot about the assignment, until I picked up my phone to check for sms messages, so I remembered but I didn’t use mine, I just think the quality is too low so I borrowed my girlfriend’s Blackberry. I was like a ninja, just going straight into the people, they didn’t bother looking at me, they just taught I was devotee going near as replicas paraded. Some posed for the pictures but most of them ignored me, compared to the DLSR which I tried to hide as much as possible to avoid attention. Small and compact, but the image quality was missing compared to the DLSR, but still usable I guess. Now the Black Nazarene was getting closer, so we had to position ourselves on the roof. Another disadvantage of the phone was zooming capabilities, once you zoomed in, image quality suffered dramatically. So I just took some snaps and switched back to my DLSR. I still liked the phone though, and with them having wi-fi and connection to the internet, they can be really useful if a news agency wanted to publish a photo right away, let’s say for breaking news. But DLSR’s will catch up, I think there’s a new one with wi-fi already. For me, it’s still DLSR but the mobile phones will be there to help us out like a sidekick and I think there’s nothing wrong with that, especially if an agency will issue me an I-phone for my use.