A Tribute to Mandy Faith

Mandy Faith is a Malaysian student who was studying in the United Kingdom. Sadly, she passed away in February 2014 from a virus and another angel was added in heaven.




I stumbled onto Mandy's blog when I was searching for tips on photos filters. 99% of the time, her photos have the exact colour tones and hues that I like a lot be it pastel, dreamy, whimsical, vintage, natural light... I fell in love with many of her photos and started reading her tutorials on Photoshop. Even though I do not have Photoshop, I applied similar techniques of adjusting the colour curves on Photoscape and I was really pleased with how many of my photos had turned out.

I'm also particularly fond of having pinkish orangey sunset tones in my outdoor photos. She has a tutorial just for that too! I really love how the photos on my blog of Venice, Florence and London look after applying her techniques. My friends often look at my travel photos and comment that I take really good pictures despite not using a DSLR and I would always inform them that photo editing plays a huge part too.

I commented on her blog post once or twice. From the way she replied to people's comments on her blog, you could tell that she is such a sweet and generous girl. She was also giving away free editing tools for her readers and was always sharing her knowledge on photography and photo editing on her blog.

Mandy had an Instagram account too and needless to say, I'm a faithful follower of hers. I would talk more about her Instagram account at the end of my post.





Check out some of her pastel tone photos. She once admitted that she was quite the collector and would buy lots of decorative pieces, trinkets and ornaments which were great objects for her to photograph.




She had before and after comparison for the photos on her tutorial and if you hadn't looked at the before shots, you might not even notice the slight sunset pinkish hues to many of her photos.










I personally love fade vintage photos when they are as a stand-alone picture or a set of pictures. I once tried this effect to some of my photos and felt it was an overload of vintage. Nonetheless, I was happy to just be equipped with the knowledge of how to edit a vintage feel to photos.




Mandy also did amazing outdoor photoshoots and from all the sweet words she wrote about her models/friends/friends of friends, you could just tell how lovely this girl is. She always had a kind word for everyone amidst the beautiful photos.




She took many cute shots of her friends too as they toured various European cities together.





She was really artistically-inclined in any form of the word "art".






I was practically walking through her lenses as I've also visited some of the cities she visited before:


London




Paris




Florence




Venice






I also love how she always seized every drop of sun ray to take beautiful shots like this.




Disclaimer:
All photos in this post are taken by Mandy Faith. I do not know how to request for permission to use her photos and I hope that since this is for a good cause, her family and friends would not take offence.





Hacking of Mandy Faith's Instagram Account

I only got to know of Mandy's passing just two days ago and the news took me by utter shock.

It so happened that I was scrolling through my Instagram newsfeed and saw a photo of a style that I did not quite like. It was a picture of a lady soldier carrying a toddler with the caption:

Do you love your mum?
Like = Yes    Ignore = No

Now, I really DETEST photos like this. Same goes for those heart-wrenching photos shared on Facebook that have captions like:

Like = 1 prayer   Share = 10 prayers   Ignore = You don't have a heart

No matter what good cause it is, I would never ever like or share such photos. I can pray in my heart all I want, what exactly does it mean by like and share equating to prayers??? In the case of that photo on my Instagram newsfeed, it works in a similar logic. I love my mum and not liking that photo certainly wouldn't demean any love for my mum.

At that point of time, I was wondering "Hey, since when did I follow such an account?"

I saw a few people asking the same question too and there would be different people replying about how they believe this was Mandy Faith's Instagram account which got hacked. Some people also mentioned that it was hacked after her death.

I was utterly shocked when I saw that comment about her passing. I started consulting my best friend aka Google and realised to my horror that it is indeed true that Mandy had passed away last month due to a winter virus. I also stumbled upon some pages demanding for people to help Mandy's family get her Instagram account back.

Have I already mentioned that this account is now called "myflawlessjournal"?

From myflawlessjournal's profile introduction:
Journal of faith love and inspiration We all have a journey to adventure Friends and places to discover But 1 thing's for sure.. Love keeps us pure

The only comment about Mandy Faith that remained (which has since been deleted when I'm typing this) was somebody asking:
"Is this Mandy's Faith account?"

To which myflawlessjournal replied:
"This is my old quotes account. I've changed theme."

It was exactly this comment which sparked me to do something more.

Each time I refreshed the page, all comments related to Mandy Faith and those puzzled/annoyed people's comments about not remembering following such an account were deleted. Only all the nice and good comments and comments tagging people to the photos remained.

I acknowledge the fact that myflawlessjournal's account seems to have kind intentions but that doesn't change the fact that he/she had hacked Mandy's Instagram account, changed her account name, deleted all her photos and replaced with photos that asked people to comment, share or tag their friends to them. I HATE, DETEST, ABHOR advertising style like this. The hacker is clearly making use of Mandy's legion of 300,000 followers (I can't remember the number but I thought I saw 300k) as an existing fan base that have most of the people clueless that they are no longer following the real Mandy. Worst of the worst, the hacker lied that it was an account with a changed theme.

Even though Mandy isn't a personal friend or even a blogger friend of mine, I felt like I have to do something for this amazing girl and wrote this comment on all the 3 photos myflawlessjournal had uploaded so far:

Dear myflawlessjournal, 

Your intention may have been good but whatever good intention you have about providing inspirational photos and quotes to people seems negligible to your intentional hacking and lying. 

It isn't nice that you have hacked an account of somebody who had passed away, deleted all her beautiful photos and even pretended that this is an old quotes account of ours that changed theme. I notice that you have also been deleting comments explaining to people that this used to be Mandy Faith's account and that her account was hacked. 

Any decent person with respect for those who passed on would leave their legacy untouched. You have completely marred Mandy Faith's legacy on Instagram.

Seconds after I posted that comment and unfollowed that account, I realised that myflawlessjournal had blocked me. I'm not able to search for this account on the Instagram app at all. Fortunately the url is still searchable.

I have provided myflawlessjournal's webpage as a hyperlink for all of your knowledge on this hacker and I do hope and none of you would follow or like his/her photos.

There is no platform for any of us third party to report this to Instagram.For a start, the follower count has definitely dropped drastically and I hope more people know of this fact and continue to unfollow. I do not know how we could help Mandy Faith's family get her account back but I hope that with more people being aware of this, maybe somehow somebody would know what to do.

Links related to Mandy Faith:
Blog
Facebook
Instagram (managed by her family)