Dipping...

What a chilly week! Now it feels like a REAL winter here. Our winter is not like it is in other countries where the temperature goes below zero (talking in Celsius) but anyway, in this week some areas were reported to be under zero by the night or mornings.
Now the challenge was to try and take some shots at night from the beach area, where the weather is severer. Went fine, but I had to bear with joint pains a bit until I got into a warmer place.

I was lucky with some timing for the low tide and like the previous time, I had to bear later on with increasing water level on the beach in this cold weather. Sometimes, only some times, you do like it when you suffer so much to create one image. My image, however, was a panoramic and essentially required such suffering!

Urban Romance I

I was lucky with the atmosphere somehow and the timing as well. I didn't know there is a crescent in the horizon (though I regret now that after I finished, I didn't take a single shot for the crescent). This allowed me to do two perspectives of the same panoramic scene (flat, that is) just by changing the perspective of the moon itself or the rocky beach.

Urban Romance II

Maybe the water in this location didn't cause me so much of a hard time, but to walk on all that soft sand from the parking lot to this piece of land and carrying my stuff was enough to give me some muscles stretching.
Of course there are other projections and styles, as usual, but maybe the one I liked the most (with some loss in details) is what I called the Sky Hugger.

Sky Hugger

It is in fact some form of the Wide-View angle that I used to apply for lot of panoramas lately, specially those from Ireland, but the concentration here was more on forming a unique curve in the shape of "U," with equal distances from the sides (from top). I don't believe this projection style is suitable to any panorama anyway. There was also a little planet projection, but maybe I did some sort of a mistake here for not cropping the outside portion to enlarge the planet itself:

Planeta Petris

The reason for not cropping the outside portion (or the space around the planet) is that in the original size I wanted to show some stars. However, and because of the high ISO (800) that took over the whole process, I had to resort to some tricks (mainly the median trick) to eliminate lot of the grain noise. With that, lot of stars got eliminated and we are left with blue space only. There are some tiny stars still left (and I tried manually to control the median effect by layer mask) but anyway it was a tedious work.
The title Planeta Petris (Rocky Planet) and also for the images done before like Planeta Ignis (Fire Planet), they gave me an idea of creating a series of "planets" if I should say, and each one of them will point to some element: Fire, Water, Air, Earth. Seems, for the time being, we have already two at hands; the fire element and the earth. How on earth I'm going to do a water and air planets, this is something I need to boost my imagination about (and certainly, daydreaming).

The night after this, I headed again to the beach and it was a REAL low tide. That is the minimum level of water and I worked in relatively a close portion of the beach, away from the water. This time it was just an experiment with my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens and long exposure. The main aim was to record star trails, but I think I miss chose my location.

Fluorescent Shades

As you can see from the image above, the shadow of the tripod is apparent. It was not a good picture after all but experimenting is made for learning after all. In this spot, Burger King was at my back and its lights, even though being pitched darkness almost, did affect the location and cast a shadow of the tripod on such a long exposure (10 minutes). The scenery wasn't specifically attractive to me and I believe I should have done it in the previous location the night before, but now I remembered that I moved from that location in the first place because there were some unexpected visitors (at 4 a.m.) and I didn't like to be asked what I'm doing by curious people (and harmful ones at times). The trail was not long enough though, and I think I would need more like 15 to 20 minutes to create long enough (impressive) lines in the sky.
Despite the icy weather, I took off from the location with some pain in the joints (knuckles specially) and dragged myself to my car then took off to buy some goods.
In that location specifically, which I took a shot for before in some long time ago, I did try my Rokinon lens again and I had to do it fast after I finished shopping. Working fast was for two reasons mainly: a) security people, b) to finish before any glimpse of sunrise. The ISO, however, proved to be problematic. I've set ISO to 400 just to speed up the shuttering time, but that proved to be a great mistake and was unable to fix the weird noise, but finally I had satisfy myself with one of the 3-bracketed shots.

Forest of Lights

Forest of Lights (old)
Canon 350D, ISO800 f/18
Small panorama.

That said and done for now, I've finally received my shipment from the DHL (arrived by Saturday and got them finally on Tuesday). Three books are now added to the queue line and I'm squandering my time between 2 books (one of them is purchased some time ago, about swords!). Among other things I've got now is a set of gel filters (which I have to make some time for and cut some pieces of it). These gel filters are supposed to be used with my Canon 15mm fisheye lens. I've some pieces already from the three types (1-, 2-, 3-stops) and tried them out and they are fine so far. The only problem is with storing them properly since they all come together in one plastic bag and they are not separated according to their values in separate packs.
There are flash gels (to color the flash shots) which I tried briefly so far, and they seem not bad except for the velcro stickers that keep on dispatching every time I want to remove the gel from the flashgun. I'm not sure how I will be using these for the time being but it's good to keep them on hand just in case. They are good for light painting, definitely. Storing them and re-using them is a problem though.

All of this is on one hand, and my other projects, like the Geltani conlang is on hold for now. Not really on hold, but the progress is slow and I'm still doing some tests here and there about it. As for the new recording for the Ayvarith project, I didn't record yet my 5th part yet. Let's hope, this coming week? Maybe! If only I can get rid of my emotions...

Laboriosus

Something went wrong this week. I don't know what is it exactly but all I know is that I've been idle and unable to perform well, with my mind or my camera. Well, at least I did something last week (after my last post) with my camera, otherwise, the week was vague. I'm trying to push myself to do some work out, even simple ones, just to activate my body somehow but even that was a fail. Anyway, in the "good news" department we have a new recording available, this time for chapter 4 of Alexander's story. You can check the English version (text only) here, and the Ayvarith version with sound clips here.
Now, let's hope I don't lag behind with chapter five.

I. More Geltani:

The progress with the new conlang and conscript is slow, yet I'm trying to work around it as much as I can. I'm settling my mind here and there about some aspects of syllables and seems I will be deriving a syllabic system out of the original Geltani script which will be dedicated for writing foreign names in Geltani. Ironically, I'm not sure how to write down "Geltan" in the Geltani script! Most probably I would make a name completely different in pronunciation.
One of the real problems that face me right now is some of the ambiguities encountered because of the abjadic nature of the Arabic orthography and script. Abjadic systems (like Arabic and Hebrew) tend to record the consonants alone and add only signs for vowels (in Arabic case, short vowels only are represented with signs and long ones with letters). Just an example from Arabic to elaborate this idea, the possibilities branching from the letters MLK.

MLK [ملك]

Mulk [مُلك]: Kingdom/Ownership.

Malik [مَلِك]: King

Malak [مَلَك]: (he) ruled/owned (Also "angel" in some context).

Mulik [مُلِك]: (he) was owned.

All of these versions of simply 3 letters (and the Arabic language is full of such examples) makes it hard for me to think of a way to go around it when forming words in Geltani based on Arabic. The original idea is mimicking the Arabic letters in form of lines in the first place, but I didn't plan for mimicking the vowels and their signs as well. I'm not sure how to go around such a problem yet, but maybe it lies somewhere between inventing new shapes and symbols and/or creating more sounds for them, or maybe exchanging short vowels for long ones to make the original Arabic word more like alphabetic in nature rather than abjadic. I have yet to think about it.

Another problem on the line is the packing of strokes and whether or not to allow one word to be written into 2 diagrams (or characters). Most probably I would try to fit all in one character as much as possible, because for the time being, and adding some grammatical twist to the whole language, I've decided to let preposition articles to be placed after the word in one line (while the sentences are written vertically top to bottom from left to right).

I'm running to simplify the grammar as much as possible (and that might be awkward when expressing some moods and modes). One of such cases is the conditional (if statements) and the habitual (would statements). So far, I've created a special character for regular and passive tenses, plus the conditional "should". Who knows, I might as well add to the already established characters for verbal words.

The initial design for verbal characters and their divisions. The tense is designated by the number of dots (not the placement of the dot).
Studying possible combinations of both divisions, regular and passive, in order to express more moods and modes.

Other variations of the same characters

II. In Slow Motion:

The beach area was a target, again, to my camera. This time though, although close to McDonald's area where I usually shoot, but it is the first time I land on the sand. I have to admit though that I went there in a hurry and didn't completely equip myself properly (specially with flashlights). The wind was strong and chill but I was determined to work with my lenses AND my ND filters as well. The ND filters caused me another problem but this time I had to investigate after this problem and I discovered that it is something reported widely for Cokin's ND filters. More details will come later on.
The clouds were nice. Not scattered much like cotton balls as I wished but they had nice shapes after all. The first thing was to try my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens with some long exposure before the sunrise above the horizon. The timing here is critical since I don't have any filters to fit fisheye lenses, so I have to time my work with darkness. The best I could get was within the range of 2 minutes exposure after all, and more than that proved to be problematic somehow. To add to my problems, as the time was a morning time and the sun would rise abvoe the horizon, then once you calculate the time required for the shutter, you have to expect that you might get blown highlights because of the gradual increase in the light level in the atmosphere.
However, it did work out well with me in the beginning with my 8mm, and made two shots; vertical and horizontal one.

Racing Heaven
~100 seconds

Race of Heavens
~120 seconds

The clouds' race is more obvious in the landscape orientation (naturally since it shows more and wider view of the sky), while the first one probably is good in the contrast between the sky and the sand.
Both images were fixed from distortion by DxO Optics Pro. This software got the option to fix the distortion without cropping (to keep the aspect ratio of width and height) and hence it gives more stretching effect on the sides and I think it is a good thing for long exposures of this kind. Notice in both shots here, the sun didn't rise yet and it was relatively dark on location.
After being done with my fisheye lens, comes here my EF-S 18-55mm lens, which is the widest thing I have right now which I could use filters with. The sun here started to show a bit, or let's say the sun rays, but the darkness was diminishing slowly. For now, although I do use metering by camera to judge how many ND filters I would need, but I got somehow a grab of sense on it. Not firmly, but a bit. I directly used 3xND8 filters (that is 9 stops: 3+3+3). One minute exposure was enough but as time was progressing, it came down to 30 seconds exposure which made the scene that I want. However, I got the same weird problem again, which eventually I've discovered that it has nothing to do with the white balance, but rather it is the make of the ND filter itself.

The scene directly from RAW file.
30 seconds exposure.

As seen, the scene is reddish and I used to get this many times in my trials with long exposures. They say a good ND filter would NOT give such a result and the colors should remain with no change, at least virtually. However, some mending process did the job to some extend the scene was recovered; but the question is, is that useful every time I take a long exposure with those filters?

Coming

I have to say though, despite the apparent "malfunctioning" of such filters, I do like the reddish look indeed. But maybe not this time.

III. Re-Visited:

The panorama taken 2 weeks ago from a deep point on the beach was something hardly can be done again (although I'm thinking about it seriously). For this reason it was hard for me to satisfy myself with what I've done before about this panorama. I felt there is more to be done.

Nox Salmiyah

Planeta Ignis

In the previous formations done with this panorama particularly, the white balance was not changed when the HDR was made out of the shots. The white balance was Daylight back then. However, with me having RAW files, I have the flexibility to change the white balance significantly.
From previous experiments with the night sky on the roof of my own home, I've realized that Tungsten white balance works better with such atmosphere. It simply adds some magic. But first, I had to recombine the whole set of images into HDR slides and setting the WB to Tungsten. It was then time to work with PTGui again, which was not an easy process (spent around 2 or 3 days trying to fix some images in their places).

Topmost

Personally, I did like it better than the previous two. In this shot however, which looks like a single shot with a fisheye lens, I've used the Mercator projection in PTGui; a projection style that I don't use much and to me, it doesn't differ much from the cylindrical projection except in some stretch in some areas (the height specifically). However, I think the Mercator projection here helped on curving the horizon upward and forming a shape of Earth's surface from outer space.
Hence we conclude, a change in WB can change the mood and feel of the image completely.

IV. Waiting...

Finally, I've placed some orders for some books and simple stuff for my camera. Things I've delayed for long until now and I think it's time to have them. This year will be starting with some heavy debt on my credit card but I need to. My plans for a vacation seem to be delayed for now and I'm not sure I will be traveling this year even. Traveling to me is more than a vacation in fact; it is a time for photography.
One of the most important items I'm waiting for right now, is something that would supposedly can solve the matter of long exposures with my Canon 15mm fisheye lens: Gel Filters.

Source B&H

Supposedly it is a pack that contains four  1-, 2-, and 3-stops filters of each. Frankly, I'm not sure it will fit in the place of the filters at the back of the fisheye lens, or would I have to cut it (as I've been told before) but I'm going to try something new after all. The thing now is to try to use such thing, if possible, with my other Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens.
Another set of gels was ordered but not for lenses this time. They are supposedly to fit my flash head in case I need to change the color cast of the flash head. No plans for using them now, but they would expand my options and might create new ideas in the near future.

Source: B&H

Finally, on the "tools" section, we have a bracket that will help me to place the flash a bit away from the camera or on the side, while still carrying it along with the camera.

Vello CB-500 Dual Shoe Bracket
Source: B&H

Now to the books section. I'm waiting for 3 books, but one of them is not about photography, but about some old passion inside me that is still burning; Archaeology.
I've stopped reading about archaeology for some time, but I felt that I have to get back now and kindle this passion again. Too bad I couldn't study this field in my early days. Anyway, the book is entitled: Forensic Recovery of Human Remains: Archaeological Approaches.


On the other hand, there two photography-related books:
1. The Photographer's Guide to Making Money: 150 Ideas for Cutting Costs and Boosting Profits.
2. Mastering Canon EOS Flash Photography.

As you can see I'm sort of dedicated to understand the flash unit more and how to control the light. Let's hope this field is digested with this little mind of mine, because I did find it difficult before to "paint" an image with light in my mind. Quite an essential capability if you want to deal with portrait photography in the first place.

Well, I've put so much in this post for now. Hope you didn't get a headache going through all of this. It's time for me to put it down, and hit the sack. So much headache involved in doing this blog... gosh!

Geltani...

Not bad for such a week, even though I got myself screwed up a bit, but seems it is the sense of adventure! Details about that will come later on anyway, when it comes to my talk about my work with the camera. As for the time being, I'm busy thinking more and trying more for creating my new con-script and conlang; Geltani. All I can say about this week for now is: it was nice. Started with some work and hopefully ending with some inspirational work, all what's missing is some good news!

I. Geltani:

As for the new conlang, I'm still working on the basics, like general shapes and logograms (pictographs) and also putting the first blocks of the grammar itself. The grammar is not supposed to be as complicated as Ayvarith is (and still Ayvarith's grammar is simpler than ordinary languages). So far, I made a decision to neglect the masculine and feminine cases and neglect the definite article (the) but use an indefinite article (a, an) only - like the case is with real Chinese and Turkish. I've developed, as well,  some special logos for other grammatical cases, like the verbs, and the plurals, as well as putting a rough sketch for the numerical system which will be decimal of course (base 10). The test is still going on however to see how flexible such symbols can be when writing them down in combination with others. But the hard part didn't begin yet.
In my previous post I've explained the main idea of dividing the word into syllables of two, where the first phoneme is the leading sound and the next would make an effect. For simplification, I've decided to call them Leading and Driving respectively. To explain it more I would refer to my previous post's example (the word "Honey"):

Honey: RLW

RL - W

[RL]: "R" Leading and "L" Driving

However, I'm constructing still the major sheet that explains the values and sounds of the Driving portion of the syllables. Almost not much concerns about the Leading part, since the sounds are specified already. It is a relation, somehow, of a cause and effect. It is close to the way aspiration and eclipse work in Irish Gaelic, to some extent. I'm shifting values here and there and there is a big uncertainty in this matter still.

Example of initial values for Leading and Driving sounds (click to enlarge)

I have to think as well and decide, whether to allow duplicates in sounds in this large collection. I also think of adding some Semitic elements to the Chinese-like conlang by adding sounds like fricative "H" (Hebrew: chet) and Glottal "A" (Hebrew: ayin).  There is still long work to do on that, and then later I have to think of some way to present my work to Omniglot. Think, think, think...

II. Soak or Not:

One of the most beautiful aspects of this week is the fact that we had rains. Yes, rains. I should start a feast and a special holiday for announcing the first drop of rain to come on this land. However, despite the amazing weather (which might not be so for some people, specially those who live in rain-soaked areas) it is of course hard to work in such conditions, but all I can do is open the window and listen to the drops of rain until I snooze.

Anyway, after some wave of heavy rains, I've discovered that the "playground" or the parking place where I usually park in my work place has turned into a swamp of mud. I almost slipped there, many times, trying to find my way into or out of the building. However, the structures there gave an idea of some shots to do, and luckily I was having my camera and tools with me!

Mud Rider
Rokinon 8mm @f/22

I've erased the car logo from the tire's cover for commercial purposes. In the shot above, I had to expand my tripod's leg and make it lower to the ground level (and getting dirty). One of the hard things to control is to take a proper shot with 8mm in such low and extended legs' level. However, after merging to HDR and before tone-mapping, I had to get to cloning out some portions to remove tiny parts of the tripod's legs showing in the shot. It is always better to clone in HDR before tone-mapping. Also, there were some cropping to remove part of the building on the left and also to pull back the tire into the lower right corner and make it closer to the sides.
The weather was nice (to me) but the problem with such weather is the hardships with the WB and how to satisfy a specific mood. things were hard with other shots around the place and in fact, after close inspection when I got back home, the images hardly impressed me. Maybe HDR tone-mapping is not always a good idea in such situation and maybe I should inspect the images in single RAWs. 

Liquor Lucis

Anyway, this tiny session around my work place was not the big bang of the week. The greater event started the day after I posted my last post in this blog; last weekend, and to be specific on the early hours of Friday and before the sun started to rise above the horizon.
Everything started right after doing a check on the tidal level when I packed my stuff (and wore enough clothes) and headed out. Actually, the tide level was not what I really wanted but it allowed me to go a bit deeper on the beach (more precisely, the beach shelf, or the hard ground under water at high tide time). The tide was minimum at around 3 a.m., but I went out around 5 a.m.. For this reason, the water level was rising slowly as I was working on my panorama.
The thing that I was really afraid of is some fellows to block my way or annoy me (you know whom I'm talking about, right?) but gracefully, everything went smooth, somehow. I soaked myself a bit but that was OK. I think the whole thing paid of (despite the annoying fact that for long exposures and for high ISO levels, there were some annoyances). However, the first result out of the whole thing was a flat spherical panorama.

Nox Salmiyah

Now, despite the bluish shades and hues in this image, the original WB during the whole process was set to Daylight (i.e. a yellowish shade). Adjustments were made later when tone-mapping and also in Photoshop in the final steps. Anyway, further trials with other WB when merging into HDR are possible ventures to tickle this panorama.
Stitching, naturally, had some problems because of the big portions from the sky (night sky, no clouds visible), but there were some nice stars visible in the long exposure slides but wouldn't be visible to the naked eyes. I've set ISO to 800, which is high, but it was necessary to ensure that the exposure at +2EV won't exceed 30 seconds long. Cleaning the noise anyway took several steps and in the original file, it might not be as perfect as I wish. There was cleaning with NeatImage and Noise Ninja and then smoothing out some areas with Median trick.
Another trial, however, with this panorama and this time without changing much of the WB which was yellowish or golden in shades, but this time the simple work of enhancing the image, turned to be a graphical design of its own.

Planeta Ignis

The glowing luminance around the little planet of Salmiyah here inspired me to work on such a design and mimic a burning comet or planet. The awkward moment here is that most of these effects had to be done in 8-bit format, since they are not available in 16-bit format in Photoshop, and this might caused, at some point, some banding. around the planet. Maybe of the hardest things to fix in both images is the weird color spots (hot pixels) which is not something new to me by now.
After this little adventure on the beach in the pitch dark dawn time, this location in fact was not a prime target for me. My real target is on the other side to the left of this location (facing the sea). That location specifically has nice rocks lying on the bed at the time of a low tide, but this place better be targeted at low tide rather than a time when the water level is coming up, like I did in this trial. This said, I have to watch out now for my chances in the coming weekend, as well as checking for other potential locations along the sea shore line (and surely be careful of cops and security people).

Well, I hope to drop this now, and get back to my Geltani project. Just thinking about the future time pressure because of these many projects makes me nervous!

Ex-Fantasies...

I just can't believe it's Thursday (or becoming Thursday). It was a slow week, and to make it worse, it feels that I couldn't do much within it, except for one thing that is not very brilliant from my side: Daydreaming. Fantasies are chasing me back and that urge to scribble and doodle all the time is hovering in my mind. I keep an eye over my camera with sorrow not knowing what to do about it. I need to move on. On the other hand, there is that recording I'm supposed to do for my Ayvarith project and the story of Alexander, but everything just hit the Pause button and like if I lost the remote to let it go on again. 

I. Fantasy Strikes Again:
Fantasies are attacking, back again. Maybe they popped up in the form of Ayvarith, a project that I'm trying hard to keep up with, but now they are back, chasing me back and urging me to get out something out of my head; Something that was kept in this head since high school in fact.
When the story of Alexander was created and many places or nations were mentioned; like the Bulughman and Zimuran, a writing system was devised then even though I didn't proceed much deeper into these systems, other than creating the script. The nation of Geltan that I've mentioned in Alexander's story, however, and which was one of the first nations that Alexander encountered, was left without a mention to a script related to them. After I finished writing the English version of Alexander's story, it was then I thought that I might break the spell by doing a "pictographic" system this time instead of Abjadic or Alphabetic systems. However, this pictographic system will be based on "radicals" and these radicals are based in their origins on Arabic. The whole system is somehow complicated, and all was formulated in high school. I was fascinated with Chinese back then.

Some of my doodles in the new script

This system was not concrete back then and I've left it untouched for a long time. Now, however, I need to push myself to do more about it and finalize something that I've left for more than 12 years. The main task for now, to me, is to transform the regular straight lines into a curve form and deviate the script from the general Hanzi or Kanji look, and along with that comes putting some basics. Exhaustive job for my brain, but this is not the bad part of the story, it is the fact that I can't stop thinking about it. I call it bad because, as much as I like it, it is a new project that I must dedicate some time to. I think this what happens when I stay away from my camera a bit and not doing panoramas as I used to do for some time. More about the camera work will come later.

The system as mentioned before, based on Arabic as well (just like Ayvarith, but without Hebrew and Aramaic) and the main "algorithm" to create words comes from assigning each Arabic letter to a Latin letter, which means some additions will be there since Arabic is composed of 28 letters while Latin (English) alphabet is made mainly of 26 letters. The radicals and their shapes were inspired also from Arabic letters, and there are Arabic features or letters that a radical was made for directly and a phonetic value that do not exist in the English alphabet was given. One of these features is the Hamza [ء] and its unique phonetic value is [chi], with "ch" as in "church". As you can see it is largely based on Arabic, because back then in high school, I didn't have the resources to get into Hebrew and Aramaic or other languages - all what I had in my pocket was Arabic and English.

Another example

The idea, for now, is to divide a word (after converting from Arabic to Latin) into syllables, and in each syllable there will be a leading part and the other is an effect on the leading part. Example:

Honey [عسل] = RLW

RL/W

Rung-wə

Only an Example

In this example above, the first syllable is [RL] and [W] is singular and it inherits a schwa (little short vowel almost unnoticed). In [RL] combination, "R" is the leading part, and "L" gives the effect of "ringing" with "-ung", and hence we end up with [rung]. Saying this, it means that for every radical or letter there should be two values given to it. A hard task I should say and the whole thing is not well-cooked yet. I need to formulate a big table with all the letters and make combinations of syllables. Finally, the whole system is supposedly to be memorized (like in any language) like people learning or speaking Chinese or Japanese would remember Hanzi and Kanji.
The idea is threatening. I never thought something from that era of high school, when it was the time that I've developed my interest in codes, ciphers and secret writings, never thought such ideas left behind more than 12 years ago, or in fact more than 15 years, would come back to this mind. It is a burden to my mind and I can't neglect it and it will be a burden over the time that I'm already screwing it up being unable to manage it properly to work on the various aspects of my life.

II. Camera Work:

Last weekend I've been to the beach around dawn time trying to capture that special light quality of that time. This time though, I didn't head to the vicinity of McDonald's on the seaside, but to a place near my home, and I wanted this place mainly to reach it as fast as possible before the sunrise begins. The place near McDonald's here would take me lot of traffic lights to pass and hence more delay to reach the place, while this location near by BK restaurant can be reached with almost no traffic lights in between (one only and doesn't make your day harder).

Caeli et Terrae

When I reached the place I started to work directly, but I was disappointed in the beginning because I was hoping for some clouds in the sky, and later the next day I found out that clouds form nicely somehow in McDonald's location as if the sky is different on both locations. Anyway, I had to forget about some long exposures with blurred skies for the time being, but then I headed downward when I saw some rocks showing (as the sea level was a bit down but not a complete low tide), and there, I've tried to do some long exposure experiments, but the adventure just began when I had to go with all these clothes on me and trying to stand in between the rocks on a muddy ground.

Nuclear Morning

With many trials, using the 18-55mm lens and holding the pack of ND filters in my teeth and wearing the camera backpack on my back, I did some long exposures but not exceeding one minute, as 60 seconds do really sound such a long time with all the struggle with the tools in the middle; it is a time when I thought I must hire someone. However, the sun was going up and up and finally I shot a 30 seconds exposure for the scene, which turned out to be better than the other 60 seconds shots. Also, something weird happened (which happened before in fact) when the original image was actually purple or violet and I had to fix the WB. Probably because the WB was set to Fluorescent. This same effect happened when I made one-hour exposure to my wall clock.

Hurry Up!

The colors were then fixed when the RAW file was edited. It seems that when using ND filters, the white balance becomes more critical and it is better to pick up the right one. Even though it can be fixed later on using the RAW editor, but after what I saw with such strange shades of purple and violet, I would say the results are unpredictable, and I wouldn't count on my luck every time to fix the colors that way.
In Nuclear Morning (a.k.a Den Nukleära Morgonen), I did an exaggeration with the WB to turn the image into a warm scene instead of the cold one (even the real scene was cold too).
The real struggle on location was to put the ND filters in the slots and re-focusing again and again. In the beginning I used 5 stops (ND8+ND4) but then I added 3 more stops (ND8) and the total became 8 stops. Such situations make me wish if I can use the welding glass, which alone would provide for 11 stops at once. Re-focusing the lens was done manual each time I put a new ND slide, mainly because of the low light level which won't make the autofocus function properly. At the end, I had a minor accident when I dropped one of the ND filters, and I would need to clean it with special cleaners then.

Working with long exposures of course didn't hold me back from taking some HDR sequences, which turned out well. I tried to keep them normal as much as possible (i.e. no dramatic light) but there was a scene that sparked my imagination a bit while working it out in Photoshop.

Unbekannt (Unknown)

Right now and after this little adventure in this mayhem, I have the urge now to do some panorama in the open there somewhere in between the rocks, with such cold weather. Something to think about for some time, and in winter, it is certainly hazardous.
Away from that, and just for fun, a scene at home captured my eyes. After going around with my camera and tripod, I decided to go for a two-shot stitch, which also had its own errors! I wasn't using the VR-head of course...

Esperando El Amor
(waiting for love)

Dramatic effects while tone-mapping gave out some nice views, but that wasn't really my intent. I just wanted it some how dark and gloomy a bit. Manual tone-mapping was a fail from my side, as usual, so I got back to Photomatix as usual. However, many other adjustments were made later in Photoshop, specially the glamor haze in the highlights. A picture that comes in a time in which I need every quark of hope in my heart...