Guided By The Night Sky

Life is the most unpredictable force in the world. One moment, it shows you a clear path and the next thing you know it’s kicking you in the opposite direction.

Aaron Palabayab thought he would become a writer, broadcaster, or musician when he entered college. But life took him to a different path and introduced him to filmmaking and photography. Just as he was rising as a commercial director, life kicked him again, this time to South America to find his calling in photographing nature.

How did you get to where you are now?

I took a video production class in my college sophomore year, then my first cinematography class where I met my mentor. I realized then that there was something fun I could do that could also become a lucrative career. That’s also where I learned still photography for the first time, shooting on 35mm film.

After college, I went to film school in Cebu then came back to Manila to work as a PA on back-to-back indie films. A friend then offered me my first job as a director and we eventually became a producer-director tandem and put up our own production house a few years later. During this time, I was regularly apprenticing with my mentor on TV commercials. In 2012, I started directing TVCs on my own.

Back then, at 26, I was considered quite young to be a full-fledged commercial director. Two years later, I had a full-on quarter-life crisis and basically quit the industry to travel to South America for two months.

Since then, life’s been a big, uncertain adventure. In 2015, I became part of a film shoot in Spain for the movie Ignacio de Loyola, directed by my mentor, and that’s when I started shooting time-lapse seriously.

What’s your photography style like?

I shoot landscapes, the night sky, and time-lapse. It’s all about spending time in nature, appreciating all the possible colors of the sky, and looking up at the stars. I try to create images that bring back the wonder and awe that city living takes away from you.