Mind = Chaos.

Maybe for the lack of people who push me up or encourage me, or simply say something nice (I say lack, I'm not saying there is none), or maybe because my... ego... is too much to bear with, I've been fluctuating over some tests here and there; partially to know myself better, and partially to feel better about myself. This time, I was in fact looking after something called the Raven test. I was informed in the beginning that it is some test related to autistic features, but later with little googling, I've found out it is also another IQ test depending majorly on shapes and patterns (no numbers, no calculations, only drawings). I had to pay a little to get this result! Typical...

Result

---

TJ
Your IQ is: 131Your age adjusted IQ score is 131 and the average score for all test takers is 98.4.
Your Grade ** Gifted **
Anyone with a general IQ this high is considered to be gifted. You have the ability to think critically, conceptualize ideas and form your own conclusions. Your ability to think in patterns and to produce order out of chaos enables you to handle complexities and see logic in everything. Needless to say you are self-aware of your abilities and have the brains for all known occupations. If you think of intelligence as the ability to adapt easily to new situations then you are at the top of the charts.






IQ Chart

IQ Range	Classification
Above 145	Genius or near genius
130-145	Very superior
115-130	Superior
100-115	Above average
85-100	Below average
70-85	Dullness
Below 70	Borderline deficiency

The question is, am I supposed to be happy for the result or concerned? Am I really gifted or my mental power is not what it should be? I hate to draw myself back to this circle after some friends (who know what they are doing) told me already that it's impossible for me to be having Asperger's. In the meantime, my daydreaming doesn't make it any brighter. Frequently switching between dreams and reality makes my brain trip and lose connection; needless to say the feeling of disappointment.... My mind is so scattered that on Tuesday, and after finishing my work, I've left my work place forgetting my camera's battery on its charger in the office and my wallet. I couldn't retrieve them back of course until the next day. I don't think this is a memory loss, but it is simply an effect of a busy mind I'd say. I'm hoping...

Been surfing through some websites trying to figure out what I need for the next phase with my camera here. Books, lens, tools; all on the list, scattered in my mind. One of the "tools" that I'm planning to get is a teleconverter. It is an attachment that expands the focal length for more zooming power supposedly. Combining this with my 70-300mm Tamron, I can probably increase the focal length to 600mm (as the specs say).

Vivitar Teleconverter for Canon EOS
x2 (Source: B&H)

I wonder though if I can connect two of those together to give me a x4 power! I'm sure that such tools won't be a match to the REAL zooming lenses, but for someone like me, who takes pictures for far objects occasionally (like birds), this solution seems fine. Also, I'm trying to find out some suitable "sound trigger", which is a tool widely used in the field of High Speed photography. The idea is to trigger the flash unit and make it work for a very short period of time (lesser than a second) just by a pulse of sound. Still searching through the net, because there are some news that such sound triggering systems don't work with my flash unit (Canon EX580 II). Makes me think of some other ways to achieve the same effect, but no results so far!

On the books list there might be around 3 books that I'd love to read as soon as I can, providing that I finish the book I'm reading now, the playful brain. One difference though is, the playful brain book is majorly read when I'm in the office, at work, while for photography books, I tend to read them whenever possible even at home. This is mainly because I feel they are instant and a must to develop myself with my camera. Yet, I have to make sure that I finish those games on my queue list first!

3 books that I think I must have by now...

Camera, games, books... you can tell what a mess I'm living, but not necessarily enjoying it all the way! All of this mess and I'm rarely looking at my Ayvarith project and creating a website for it. Not only that, but also, out of boredom, and because I didn't try to take any panoramas for some time now (full spherical panoramas that is) I've went on doing a little experimenting with my 3-legged monopod, and done a panorama for my own bathroom! Yes, my bathroom. Why? Don't ask me please. There are shaky images, as the monopod was extended to a higher level than my head and thus, it was hard to keep it stable (it is shaky already even on shorter heights). Total weight of the camera and the VR-head is around 3kg (~6.6 lb). It was an experiment and I'm already having problems with the panorama as I'm typing these words. I've deleted the images already because of the wrong way I did take these images and many HDR merging problems! I might take it again at another time. One of the challenges, however, in this bathroom panorama is, I couldn't decide what White Balance (WB) should I choose. For the time being, I shot it with Tungsten to balance the great yellowish glow from the 2 bulbs in the bathroom, but that made the pinkish walls go yellowish in a dull way, removing all the heat (or should I say, action) from the walls. However, this hopefully can be adjusted later when I tone-map the HDR finalized version (if the stitching problems are resolved). Another challenge was the height, which I had problems with when trying to adjust the tilt of the camera upward or downward, and going for 30 degrees up and down was not a good bet I'd say. Must have done it with 45 degrees up and down or 30 degrees twice in each direction.

I've been shopping now and buying "flood lights" in various colors. Right now I do have a neutral (yellowish), blue, green and red. I like these lights because of their "flowing". I can imagine them as water of light pouring down on the subject. One of the features I like about these lights also is, they don't appear to be intense when ambient light (in my room) is on, but when the room is dark they show bright. Now having the basic RGB colors of flood lights, this inspires me for few more experiments. 

Philips 80W red flood light
(Source)

Beside those lights there are some tools on the side, like light bulb bases and some other things to store these tools because my stuff are scattered all over the floor. I need double my room size (which is already a couple's room) to store everything I need I suppose. Thinking about that even gives me a shiver for the cleaning I'd be needing to do for such a room!
However, one of the tools or kits I got was storage pockets that can be hung on the wall or the door. I'll be using these to store the light bulbs and (some of the) lighting kit. These pockets were wrapped up around some hard paper, almost like a wood in fact, thus I decided to use this in some way. There are two of them, thus I picked one and drilled in the middle of it to make it as a stand for future use when I need to use the light-holders whose bases are in the form of a clip.

The board mounted on my monopod

Close up for the drilled hole with the monopod's bolt going through it

I've had some ideas to take some pictures in the bathroom (nope not a panorama), but this time for a flowing water. Unfortunately, it didn't work alright to post it in this blog still. Hopefully I will work on that in the future. Caution(s) needed here, since I was trying to bring my light (simple) equipment and a wire extension to the bathroom near the basin to light the flowing water. One drop and everything can be bye-bye...

Nevertheless, I've been working on other days on some catches from seashells. Flood lights here played a crucial rule in "pouring" on the color of the shel. Originally, the shell was greenish, and I've fixed it under a neutral flood light (which gives out a yellow beam). The shot was intended for HDR (i.e. bracketed shot, from -2 to 2) and the WB was Tungsten (to neutralize the heat of the color of the light beam). However, with tone-mapping, and even with Tungsten WB, the heat persisted, thus I had two choices here, to keep up the warm look, or to adjust the temperature slider in Photomatix to the maximum left to cool the colors down. I decided to go on both ways (and change some other settings as well to achieve certain look).

Spiral Shell
with Temperature down

Drama Shell
with Temperature slider slightly above zero point
Someone commented on it saying it's like a rolled up chameleon!

These two shots, however, was an aim to perform a focus-stacking, where several shots are taken on different depth of field (DOF) and then combined by layering the shots and blending them together to get a sharp macro shot. I tried it on these shots but the change in DOF was not to be mentioned here. I think this is because the subject here is not elongated along the camera's view, but more like a flat disk (in some way) and lies almost in one plane of view with respect to the camera.
Also this week, I went on trying the peeling effect again, this time on my censer. Actually, the shots were taken around two weeks ago, but I didn't go on doing this until last week.

Peeled Censer

Take it from me: the more regular and geometric the shape is, the harder it is to do the peeling effect. Why? This is mainly related to the eyes and how sharp your viewer is. In an irregular shape, like the seashell done before (below), the irregularity helps on tricking the eye and you won't have much hard time blending (manually) the different layers together, because the mind already perceives such shape as irregular. In more regular shapes like the censer above, things tend to be harder, and more harder with a light source concentrated in some unique direction. You have to blend carefully trying the best you can to eliminate any "errors" that can be obvious to the naked eyes. In the censer here I wasn't so good at blending and I had to do lot of cloning out, and still the image is not so good, to me.

Peeled Shell

I think I will stop playing around with this trend of tricks and try to work more on some expressional photography, where I would make something out of my mind completely to express some thought or emotion, or simply try to be innovative with my lights here. I still have problems though with those light holders!

Video-wise now, well, I'm not a videographer, but always had and still have fun recording from inside my car, and I still have this idea to record a video in Failaka island. However, I'm in the process of converting all those .MOV files into .MPG (NTSC) and delete the original MOV. This also would help me to cut out some portions of the files easily, as I discovered that lot of programs I have do not deal with MOV or got problems reading such files, and of course helps me to save some space. This conversion almost reduces the file size by 50%.

This is my life now; a total chaos. I need someone to organize my time for me, and I don't stop stuffing my mind up with stuff I think I need to do, and still they push more on my time. I'm trying to get back to exercising little bit, not for a diet or anything (I'm still having bad eating habits) but just to train my body on enduring some aggressive conditions, and maybe, just maybe, I would just feel refreshed and out of my mind's troubles. If only I can get rid of the damn traffic jam...

R.I.P.

Tiresome and a sad week, and the dust made it worse. After struggling with time and having hardships to pick "my" street cat to the vet, just few minutes before writing this I got a phone call from the vet to tell me that he died, after vomiting blood all night. One more thing to lose in my life... he was an animal... but sort of listens to me humbly even though he didn't reply back or show emotions... but at the end he used to listen. He used to lick my toes all the time. I always wondered why...

R.I.P. Tiger

I will try to get over it. For now, I have to think of coming projects with my camera. I got one project done almost perfectly, that was the peeling of a seashell...

Peeled Seashell

I say almost perfect, because the bottom of the shell was not added here, and the shell was somehow awkwardly positioned on some clay to make it stand in a right angle. Almost. The merging process was a tiresome but not as much as before (the angle of rotation was set to 30 degrees here instead of 10 degrees like I did last time, making 12 images horizontally). For this reason I had to cut the bottom somehow to remove the yellow clay piece that was used to fix the shell. I think I should not have added the tops as well since I added the topmost part (as you can see on the top of the left side). Well, one more experiment to learn from. The non-uniform shape of the shell helped me I guess to merge the different angles with not much easy-to-see errors I would say. Right now I'm planning to do the same process with a more regular shape: my old lovely censer...

Luminositatis

Like the previous shell, I've fixed the angle of rotation on 30 degrees, but this time instead of using the regular 80W plain flood light, I used a blue flood light, on the top. My main point in the beginning, actually, was to take a single shot after all, trying to find some good contrast between the blue light and the reddish body of the censer (or purplish) and the red interior when the candle is on, but I think I made it better than I thought myself. I didn't have this effect in my mind. Despite that the above image is a HDR composed of only 2 images (at 0EV and -2EV), yet, the single shots did not differ much in shades. The only thing I made it into HDR here is to control the light of the candle and reduce its luminance solely without reducing the exposure of the image, and HDR-way is more convenient for controlling the luminance level. Will work soon on a peeling effect for this censer as well.
However, this was not my first trial to play with lights, or as some call it "light painting". I did try something but it was not successful as I wished, but after all an image was produced and some people liked it already.

The Swedish Shell
Svenska Snäcka

The image here is in fact a tone-mapped HDR, which I worked hard with Photoshop to enhance. Thus, I can't really call it "light painting". In light painting, you are supposed to work majorly in Bulb mode (that is opening the shutter and closing it as you wish). Here it was so hard to do that because of the time I did it in, and because of the strength of the yellow light was much greater than the blue one, and it needs very precise timing to turn off one light and light the other AND not overexposing the image. I got rid of all of that and simply worked in HDR format. Photoshop was needed to enhance the contrast and pronounce the faint blue color more, and to remove (by cloning out) the clay piece that was holding the shell stand still.
Light painting is an interesting art with the camera but surely needs lot of practice and sensing your own camera sensor. Most probably ND filters would be needed here to control the exposure and avoid overexposing your image like I did here. It's a long story I need to work with some time later. Light painting is not necessarily done in Bulb mode of course, but this is usually the way it is done because in Bulb mode you have infinite time to work with until you close the shutter by yourself, while other moods like (M)anual and (T)ime (v)alue would limit you to 30 seconds maximum for a single shot. I remember though in my old Canon 350D, the Bulb mode was integrated within the (M)anual mode, but in Canon EOS 7D, it is a separate mode.

Now and then I would get back to the images I took from the Scientific Center, and trying to get away with the noise level in most of them if not all. It is like an arsenal for me now after I stopped working with pictures from Ireland for some time now. Of course, not much HDR there to be done in these images but with ProPhoto color space (which unfortunately do not adhere to lot of websites like Photobucket and MostPhotos), a set of vivid colors can be extracted, with the noise of course. RAW file processing sounds fine when it comes to colors and contrast (but not always), but noise-wise, it's never enough, specially with a noise level of ISO12800. For this reason, not all images were (to me) applicable to be submitted online, excluding MostPhotos of course where you can upload almost anything above 5MP in resolution.
Nevertheless, RAW files got some nice features beside the color-related options, like Clarity. Clarity is an option that partially controls the sharpness of the image. Control this option carefully and you can have an amazing effect to your image. Notice that the sharpness here is not like the sharpness that would be fixed by dedicated plugins or by the RAW editor itself, but it is simply controlling the outer edges generally. You can make a "dreamy" effect by reducing the Clarity to some specific amount (depending on the image of course). One of the amazing things I've encountered while "playing" with this option while working on my Scientific Center images was this one...

The dotted fish
still looking after its official name!

In this image, increasing the clarity did literally increase the size of the black dots on this fish (which I don't recognize its name yet!), while reducing the clarity, the black dots became smaller (with the dreamy effect a bit). I decided to reduce the size of the black dots here to not make it "bulky" looking.
With these images from the aquarium, even when HDR was possible, I consider checking the RAW files and try to get something out of them. HDR is well-known for producing grains in the images even with low ISO (and sometimes it is hard to clean later even with dedicated noise filters). The thing after all is, what is your mood? Worry about the noise later on...

Abyss (RAW)

Abyss (HDR)

In the previous two images for the aquarium in the Scientific Center, I was really fluctuating between the two. I like them both. I like the RAW version for its mysterious look, and I like the HDR version for its vivid and enriched colors (and pronouncing more the sun rays in water). Notice that this (bracketed) image was taken at ISO12800, thus despite the smooth look in a small version like this, in large format it really... sucks big time.

Let's leave photography at this point though. I got lot of images that I've prepared but I can't put them all in here at the moment, but maybe when I need to talk about some specific topic. Working with these photos made me lazy about my Ayvarith project now. I completely forgot about it! The last thing I did was to simply make the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story into the public (with sound examples only in the preface). On the other hand, I'm trying to dedicate some time to read this book I got last month and just started to read it, and typically, the only time I have is, at work (how ironic)!

The Playful Brain
reading on process!

The book is about solving puzzles to enhance various functions of the brain. Very interesting and amusing, and there are lot of practices or "training" to enhance various skills. So far, I'm still in the first part of the book which talks about Memory. There are some practices that I need to dedicate some time to do though, if I'm to be serious about my brain! Since when I was anyway? However, there is a nice website connected to this book: www.theplayfulbrain.com, which contains some amazing videos and news.
Time to post this for now, and have a moment of silence over the lovely cat that passed...

Indian Threadfish (Alectis indica). Local name: Udhaimy
عظيمي

Fortunati...

Had been a weird week sort of. Flew away so fast and, weird weather too. Just on Wednesday you would see the world in a yellowish cover from the dust and the visibility, I presume, was lesser than 500 meters (~1500 ft) if not lesser than 100 meters  (~300 ft) even! I had to go to work anyway but later on I've been told that the employees and admins left the place already! But I stayed until 1:00 p.m. (I finish at 2) and wow, wish if the streets are like that everyday, minus the dust of course.

Taken from my mobile that day, this short video just to show the dusty weather we had on Wednesday. 

Notice that the meteorology department says "we have fresh air"  (???)

Just when you don't take your camera with you and take videos or pictures wherever you go, all the opportunities seem to be showing up in your face wherever you go and you feel paralyzed. However, after this weather we had a "nice" weather back. Literally nice weather with 17°C (62.6F), like some sweet morning in November here. Our weather does not need a meteorologist, but a fortuneteller.

At home, I haven't been doing much, but only taking pictures of the seashells I've collected in the past few weeks, and working on my own project of "peeling" objects (those are shells from the time being). However, I've worked with some pictures from my visit to the Scientific Center a bit and worked on singular shots for my seashells as well.

Leopard Whipray

Unfortunately, those images from the Scientific Center that were taken at maximum ISO (12800) were so hard to clean and somehow were not so appealing. Even the dedicated profiles for Canon EOS 7D that were made ready for NeatImage at this ISO, were not enough to clean the noise. Mostly, they would clean the luminance grain noise, yet there is a hard-to-remove chrominance noise (color spots) that were desaturated a bit, but not removed completely. Beside, the image looks so soft with lot of details lost.

To over come the chrominance noise in this shark shot, which strangely were mostly concentrated on the outside of the shark's body, I've decided to turn everything into Black and White and keep and shark in color. ProPhoto space seem to push such noise type further and cause a problem for any filtration effort!

Nevertheless, there are some points even with ISO12800 where I worked out some HDR images just for fun. They are bad enough with all the noise, thus I didn't care much about how I tone-map them, so I worked less on giving a realistic look for such an image...

The Aquarium of the Scientific Center
People didn't like this image because of the effect or the high noise level, yet what I believe, noise level should not stop you from using your image in any way possible.

 On the shells side now, I've began using my new self-made turntable mounted on the base of the Manfrotto SPH303. Giving some trials still on how to achieve the peeling look for my shells; trying various shells for now. Unfortunately, the process is tiresome. My first trial was with a shell of highly irregular conical shape (unfortunately I don't have a picture at hand at the moment) that comes with spikes. The first trial was set on 20 degrees for each shot (and the lighting provided was on onside). Because of the spiral conical shape, seems that the peeling process (adding layers with layer masks; eliminating the unneeded parts) was going in a wrong way. Probably for such shapes the peeling must go in circles around the center and not sideways! However, I stopped working with this project and moved to taking pictures of single shells:

My current settings after moving from one side of the room (to my right here) to this position where I stuck Velcro on the wall and on the white board to ease putting on and removing. The desk lamp is used to eliminate the object from the top giving some hard shadow on the turntable but at this point it's not so important. With a macro lens and flash unit, and setting WB: tungsten or fluorescent to balance the hot yellow color of the flood light from the desk lamp, the background looks blue rather than white. Probably, I should stick the turntable to the white board next time.

Ringed shell. I wonder if these rings tell the age of the shell itself?

As you can see, I've been using the turntable itself as a stand post for such shots without using the softbox that I've made at home. The softbox makes soft shadows for your objects and you can surround it majorly with 4 light sources (sides, top and front) and it would give a nice white background. I don't mind the hard shadow here though since it's at the bottom of the object. I fix my objects standing like that with a little piece of children playing clay (maybe you can see a bit of it in the image above at the bottom right side under the shell).

One problem here as well, is the center of the circle which I have to appoint precisely. Common problem I've been facing now while rotating my object is having the object at offset from the center relative to the camera's lens. In macro shots, everything becomes so so sensitive! Too many things to take care for, and shots are better be taken with Live-View on (to avoid the mirror flipping and shaking the camera) and of course, a remote (wireless) is a must. 

Later, I've picked another small conical shell but not spiral this time, and more regular in shape (horizontal-wise at least), and this time I've set the base to rotate at 10 degrees instead of 20, which means 36 shots for a complete circle. Done this already (in RAW format) with flash unit and flood light on top, and it was a tiresome process as it is. The flash unit (580EX II) got tired of me and needed a change of battery (but I didn't change the battery as I preferred to wait longer for the recharge than change anything in the configuration). The process now is on the go and started it already, but as I said, it is a long process and a tiresome one, and the picture is not ready as I'm typing this. My panorama programs didn't help much in identifying the type of movement here so I have to do everything manually. With 36 shots for the whole body, minus the top and bottom), the transition of rotating shell was smoother (you can see that by moving through the images quickly and you will see the shell as if it is rotating), and also I've dedicated 18 shots to be "welded" on the right of the basic starting image, and 17 on its left, making the starting point in the center. Although the shots are in RAW (18MP) but I preferred to reduce the resolution and work with TIFF-16bit instead. It is slow already like that, so imagine working with 36 RAW files stacked as layers, as they are 18MP!!!

Ayvarith-wise now. I have to admit I was lazy and awkward toward this project but it was for the sake of working with my camera! Anyway, I've removed the "private" status from the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story in WDC. I was planning to remove this status when I add the vocal sample for a narration in Ayvarith for the whole set, but I think this can be done later, as the transliteration is almost ready and the preface is ready with vocal samples to show how some letters are pronounced. You can check it for yourself here. The Ayvarith transliteration is dedicated as a folder by itself. I'm trying to find some time to record the narration, but with this weather and these jams, my body has a swing of moods...

I'm going to post this now and get back to my Italian music session. It's nice to get away from the English a bit now and then...

A Vacation?

What a little vacation I was looking for. Since Sunday there had been winds and dust that canceled the trip to Failaka island on Sunday and Monday, while Tuesday is off. The good thing though is I can sleep as much as I want, and also I kind of had time to clean my room! (Yes, clean my room). Also, I've been taking some simple pictures in this weather for the beach and doing a time-lapse (since the tripod was there preparing to shoot a video on Failaka from the car). By coincidence, I blocked the camera rear when the camera is on the tripod inside the car, and that's by putting my handbag which contains my old tripod and the VR-head on an extra shelf in my trunk. I always wanted to do that before because when I shoot a video, the LCD of the camera will be obvious and people can see (from the back) that I'm running the camera, specially when I raise the tripod's neck a bit.

Vivid Dreams

With the turbulent weather in the early morning and before the arrival of dust in the air, there was a moment when the clouds (and not the dust) blocked the sun on the beach, after having my breakfast there. With the sun, it was naturally my first choice to go on with HDR to show the details in the clouds later. Maybe not much details are shown here but originally, the images didn't show much details for them at all (except of the darkest one at -2EV). Maybe I should have adjusted the interval of the exposures. Nevertheless, some shots were indeed processed directly from the RAW files and not into HDR. The only problem here is, I like to process those in ProPhoto space which Photobucket and MostPhotos websites don't recognize!

Vivid Dreams II
from single RAW

Of course the colors you see here are a bit desaturated and not as vivid and wild as they should be in ProPhoto. However, some people liked it "soft" like that already, which is something good, for now.
On Wednesday, I decided to go to the Scientific Center and try my luck with photography if I was allowed. Well, the beginning was scary a bit and the security was hesitant to let me in, but at the reception I've discussed the matter with the receptionist, while the hall looked so busy with lot of students as it seems! Great; another strike from my luck. However, the receptionist made me sign a paper which had some legal terms of how to use the pictures and I'm supposed to give them the pictures on a CD or something after I finish. My shoot was in RAW and I completely used my 16GB CF, then my 1GB then my last resort, the 8GB CF (which was in the old Canon 350D and I didn't want to remove it till I really needed it). Quite a load! I'm not sure if I can use these pictures online though but I did submit some of them already!
For me, it was only an experience to take pictures in the darkness. Thus all the shots were in high ISO (meaning more noise). I've tried to process some snaps but the results were not really to my liking, and I had hard time as well because of the "mess" around with all these kids! UGH!

Random Theory

Lynx1
وشق

Zebra fish

The rest is still waiting to be processed of course. The noise level is high and the pictures are better viewed in small size and not in the original 18MP size, obviously! This trial made me think of other trials in the future since it is kind of easy to just "sign a paper" and "get on"! The other bad point is that I didn't have my tripod or monopod; with my fear already I didn't want to take a risk, and the result was a lot of shaky images.

The Turntable:

Now, I've been thinking of some concrete way of making this turntable and I think I've found the solution in a cork mat and a Velcro sticker. After some trials I think this will do (as I didn't try it for real yet). Of course I had to add a white cover for the cork mat to make it more proper in white instead of the brown shade!

The cork mat with Velcro patch on the soft face, and 4 small patches stuck on the slider on the right of the cork mat. The slider is a piece provided as an extra with my VR-head (Manfrotto SPH303) as an accessory to use small cameras with this VR-head. And yes, those are my slippers on the ground.

The cork mat with a white soft sheet stuck on its top (or on the harsh part).

Now, all what is left is to put this cork mat on the slider and then fix them on the top of the rotating part of the VR-head. Voila! A turn table. The point is stabilizing the disk itself and not rotating it by itself, as the rotation will be done by the base, hence, I guess a hard type of Velcro to make it stable while rotating is enough. Maybe extra stuff needed to stabilize the object on the top when at work, and currently I'm using some playing clay (play-duh or whatever brand that is) to stick my objects. It's not always a good option though, as I did with this simple macro shot...

Black Beauty

In this shot, the yellow clay was all around the shell in the background, which was stuck to a white board, however, Photoshop did the job and I managed to remove it. The problem is, maybe a small amount won't be enough to stick some objects. This shouldn't be a big deal on a flat turning table, but just in case. I still need to try it out. The next step now is to work seriously hard on my "flattening objects" project.

Well, all in all, it wasn't that bad in this short vacation, although lot of things I wanted to do, I didn't; like my trip to Failaka which was disturbed by the weather, and also my own recordings for the Ayvarith text which I completely forgot about, but at least was able to sleep and wake up without any stress for one week, but all of this will be back the coming week...

Silent Observer