While we haven’t blogged in nearly two years, we’ve realized that its nice to have a record of our travels (more for us than for readers). We’re going to try to add a few past trips in the coming weeks and keep things updated moving forward. If you’re new to the Polaroid Project, check out the first post for an explanation or the archives for other iterations.

Before our trip to the Philippines, we upgraded the Polaroid Project by purchasing a FujiFilm Instax Share SP-1 Smartphone Printer. The printer still prints on instant developing film just like the old camera, so we lost none of the magic of watching an image appear out of nowhere. But we also gained a few big advantages. First, we could take photos on our iPhones. This means we could take as many as we needed and then crop or edit until the subject was completely happy with his or her photo. Second, we could print multiple copies of the same photo. So if friends wanted to pose together, they no longer needed to fight over the resulting image. Lastly, since the photo taking and printing are separate, we can still give away the portraits, but also keep digital copies for ourselves.

Our first stop in the Philippines was on Malapascua, a small island off the northern tip of Cebu, right in the heart of the Philippines. The island itself is only about a mile wide at its widest point. A rudimentary tourism scene is slowly starting to dominate the island’s coasts, but the narrow dirt streets that wind through the interior of the island are full of kids. We initially found a group of five kids who posed for a photo, but before we knew it, dozens of other kids surrounded us. Each had his own unique pose or hand signal.