Stimulus

Quiet weekend. Not going out or anything but sitting here facing my photoshop and mangling with my photos. I woke up at almost 9 p.m. last night and stayed awake until the morning of today. Diarrhea was attacking me now and then. I think it is a consequence of the change in weather or the wave of dust we had lately here. However, by the morning time and just before the sunrise begins, I started the engine and went over to the beach beside some restaurants there to try to catch a glance of the Kuwait Towers and convert the images into an HDR. Boy, was I sick of the situation! Kids and families were sitting there before the break of dawn and playing soccer as well! The most amazing interaction was, when I was pointing my camera in some direction and then suddenly and icecream guy looked at me and just stood there and not budging. I know what's the definition of being rude but this guy can be set as an example!

However, I left the beach in a hurry as I couldn't catch much and the sun started to rise already. I think HDR are best when you have a dark atmosphere somehow and not to catch photos under plain lights. This is my impression at least. I might post some photos for the Kuwait towers later on though.
After leaving the beach I was heading to some market to buy some stuff for my own breakfast but unforutnately on the way I felt such a severe pain that made me get a U-turn and head back. On the way back though, and despite the pain, I decided to stop a moment after I glanced some view that captured my attention, and so I decided to snap it. Of course, after snapping, the work at home starts:

The picture above was taken from several angles but I think this is the best angle it was taken with. At home, the picture was composed into HDR and then several processes took place to enhance colors and give some other effects to the image. This scene reflects the old and the new Kuwait and whether we are building or knocking down our heritage to be a nation without a history. The old muddy house below dates back somehow to the 1950s at least, judging from the way it was structured.

Last night as well, and since I was not going out anywhere, I spent most of the time playing around at some of the photos I took of the dome, that I snapped on the 12th. I had a problem since the best image I had and composed into an HDR was in fact not centered and the right side of the image was cut. After many, many, many trials and hours of working on it, I think I got a fine result by now, although I can't say it is as pretty as the one I did before and posted in the last entry. This image was composed of sticking and gluing parts of other images together and doing a short panoramic merge for 2 images and then taking parts from other images to fix the lost area. After all, I took the complete half (left side) of the image and tried to complete the right side with it. When all failed because of the light and shadow in the image itself, I got some success, when I converted the image into a rectangular coordinates then back to polar (guys who deal with photoshop know this from the distort menu). This move filled in some empty spaces in the image which made me crop it later on with some equality on the sides.

Just few hours ago, I was also working on the panoramic view, taken from the same hall of dome, and despite the colors, it had in fact lot of noise and remove them I had to sacrifice somehow with the sharpness of the image, which makes me reluctant a bit to submit it to stock photos sites. They are hard to accept such "normal" photos even! The real size of the image is supposed to be 240cm tall and around 110cm wide, and sorry can't convert this to feet right now!

Notice that the "pipe" looking thing at the top of the image, is in fact the pillar that was just behind the camera. The photo shoot was running from the ground level (at 0 degrees) and I was pushing the camera upward for few degrees between every shoot. At the end, when the camera was at the final position (90 degrees) you can see the result is a pillar going on the top of the image!
i have to make some cleaning for the images taken in the past 3 days. I have 3 folders so far and the PSD (photoshop format) files are mixed with JPGs. The size of the 3 folders reached almost 2GB!!! I have to remove stuff, and store it the usual way in its own folder to be packed later on on a DVD, but that does not mean my work with the dome is over yet. I'm still planning to look more into it so I might get a new idea and new construction that can be made with what I have so far.
An idea just occured to me, I might make a shoot of my own work place from the outside. But such a building is a sensitive place to be posted in stock photos!

It had been some days now and I didn't do any work with my Alexander's story, which made this blog more like an artistic place for photography and not the conlang of Ayvarith. The translation is almost stopped. I have to think of some way to stimulate me on writing more of the translation! Now, with my partner's coming back from vacation, I think I might have some time for myself and try to write down both, the Alexander's translation and the Blackened Image story. The month of fasting, Ramadhan, is on the doors by next week or so, thus I don't know how am I going to do, specially that I need some stimulants (coffee, redbull, ...etc). I pray my mood would be in a better situation by the coming days. Mood is very important in writing, and for this I didn't write any poems lately, and my pace with other activities is downed. All what I'm waiting for, for now, is my vacation...