Lazy…

OK I admit; I have been lazy in the past week. Well, 2 weeks. That's why no post last week. The temperatures here dropped suddenly with a chilling wind on and off. Truly a bone breaker. Not sure why, but I've been feeling tired and lazy lately to even go out at night in such weather which I like the most. Probably it is the erratic sleeping pattern (which persists even in working days). For this reason, I've been mostly editing and creating new panoramas, besides trying a bit of the new "observations" in the field of panoramas to some of the older panoramas. Moreover, there is one extra observation on the way as well!

An-Mór

I never thought of myself being so interested in such projection style which seemed so boring before like Mercator. The beginning with this projection was (as mentioned in previous posts) was to make a more plausible vertical panoramas because vertical panoramas are "slim" and cropping the sides would do more harm. Mercator was a solution because the vertical perception comes almost in a square ratio (height = width), and occasionally the sidelines make a nice curvature with no need to crop even! However, time had to come to push my views further with an extreme approach.

Ashford Domhanda
(global Ashford)

The beginning was about doing a vertical panorama (again) for Ashford castle in Co. Mayo, but with a twist or a swirl as it was with other panoramas recently. However, this approach didn't work out and I decided to play with the sliders a bit. All to be done was to stretch the viewing window or space to the extreme ends to show the full extent of the Mercator projection rather than compressing it, and the result as you can see in Ashford Domhanda; a global look like those maps which are also made using Mercator projection.

Casadh an tSúgáin
(twisting of the rope)
I was seeking a swirl like this
for Ashford castle panorama.

My personal impression about the implications of such projection style is that it gives sense of grandness, totality, greatness; probably these impression come from the back of my head as I used to see lot of Mercator maps (specially in school times). However, this projection style has one awkward disadvantage, even though a normal result: the stretched and blurred sides and corners. My intentions were to crop these portions out in the beginning, but that would corrupt the overall oval shape of the center, which is to be the main interest. For the time being, I would just call this style as Extreme Mercator. I'm still working on discovering the possibilities here, and specially with old panoramas.
When it comes to old panoramas, I made a trial to do the "twisting" effect again with one of the places I like and taken a panorama from back in 2013: The Arab Organizations Headquarter. Such a place with quite amazing wooden craft and Arabesque and Islamic designs. Anyway, it seems a twist here is not quite that attractive, for various reasons...

El Andaluz Bailando
(the dancing Andalusian)

Generally speaking, the hall is a mess. Despite the fact that it was wide and bears not many obstacles in view, yet it had many reflections, and twisting the panorama that way as in El Andaluz Bailando made some eyes "sore". I sort of came out with a conclusion that to do a twist, the roof of the place must be close and it is better to have the surroundings on the ground arranged in some systematic manner. In the case of El Andaluz Bailando, the roof was too high, and the surroundings on the ground were not giving out a sense of symmetry.

An Solas Sníomhta
(the twisted light)
The twisting effect appears stronger
and more concrete when the roof is at proximity

However, the work was not limited to Mercator, despite being big part of my work lately. The old tunnel projection (the reverse of the planet projection) was a target for some "surreal" editing. It is a surreal projection after all, but I mean here something out of the usual look for such projections. Something off-center.

An Cúinne Geal
(the bright corner)

Frankly, I was aiming at a sweeping movement for the landscape and the house and decided to make the tunnel projection as a starting point. However, things went out of hand a "bit". Why would I restrain myself for centralizing such panoramas anyway? Specially those which do no possess any degree of symmetry anyway! Call me an impressionist, but those curves can do a lot further when moves off the center; Curves = Emotions.
The main problem here is the cropping factor. No, not the sensor's crop factor. Here, the original panorama was 9000x9000 pixels in size (meaning a resolution of 81MP!). However, after some crops to adjust the portions of the panorama and the curves of lines (controlling those with coordinates is hard), the size came down to around 5000x5000 pixels (i.e. 25MP). Such a loss of size. Of course, I can stitch it again with a larger size to crop it back again, but that means more processing power. Imagine this: for a panorama coming down from 81MP to 25MP with such crop, then that means only 30% of the original size is used. If I'm going to do this on the usual size of 8000x8000 (64MP) like most squared panoramas before, then I would need to stitch to somewhere around 213MP in resolution, that would be somewhat around 14500x14500 pixels; this is just to crop it down to the size of 64MP.
Anyway, this is just the beginning, in hope that I would do more observations about this. One of my goals right now is to create something else with panoramas, specifically in a vertical format, but no success so far. All I can say about it right now is, it would be a diagonal panorama!

Geltani Again!

I know, I've been neglecting this project for a really long time and I've totally forgot about doing some representation for Omniglot.com as well.  However, I was working slowly for some time with this project before traveling to Ireland last October and I think I didn't post anything about these "inventions" and additions.
For a beginning, I tried to make a standard set for the "radicals"; those large strokes that contain other glyphs combinations. Usually those radicals are the last letter of the word. I wouldn't say it is a final set, but it is a trial to make it so.

A scan for some of the radicals designed already (from my Geltani notebook). Sorry for the bad quality here; I did barely make it through the technical problems! The asterisk here points to the position of the other glyphs relative to the general (larger) radical glyph.

On the other hand, there had been some tiny approaches to imagine out a general aspect for the grammar, and this was by some trials to form the passives, conditionals and perfectives. Not planning to complicate things here, so the general formula for such phrases would consist of a mix of the verb "to be" in a specific tense, with the original tense marker of the verb itself. This is the idea for now and seems it works (logically!).

Another scan for some grammatical constructions with the verb "to fly" which transliterate as "píj" (pron: peej, with "j" as in "jacket").
The top 2 columns of 4 lines discuss the direct tense (flew, fly, will fly, fly!) on the right column, and the passive form (was flown, be flown, will be flown) plus the modal (should fly) on the left column.
Next line is an example: would have flown, which literally here becomes (fly-will be-was)
Next example: he should have flown, literally here becomes (must-fly be-is)
Last example: would have flown (to...), which literally becomes (... to fly-was be-was)
As seen here in general, it is combination of two tenses of the main verb and the verb "to be"

Beside these forms, it seems that it would be necessary to merge some phonemes or sounds in Geltani when they come successively, like the sounds of "J" (as in Jacket) and "Ch" (as in Church), but I'm not sure yet of this theory right now. I hate to deal with a language like mathematics - this is not the way I learned English (even though it's not perfect anyway!), but it is important to "live" the language and make sense of it. Just get into the flow and only then things would fit into place, and this is what I'm trying to apply myself as I'm going through some Irish lessons online (sadly written and no audio available).
It is funny though how I got into formulating the grammar without even working on representing my work and the script. I've been overwhelmed with many things to do at the spur of the moment which effectively made my mind scattered in all directions.

Finale

Snufkin

The Moomins

Well, I won't be ashamed to say that one of the reasons to be lazy in the past week and this week is the fact that I was busy playing games, and watching cartoons. Old cartoons that is, like The Moomins. Well, I remember this cartoon long time ago (and played in Arabic back then of course and I'm watching this version specifically) and I used to get scared somehow every time it is played because it, simply, looked weird. However, now it gives another feelings when I watch it, specially after knowing that originally this Finnish comic and stories were dedicated to adults with some deep meanings. To me it resembles the simplicity and the life of adventure in simple terms, needless to say the imaginative stories and the countryside framework which fits my mood perfectly. I think my favorite character here is Snufkin. This is the English name of course. I like his role and I think it does have some aspects that I need, crave, or already have. This is not the only cartoon on the list; Golden Cities (or as dubbed in Arabic: Golden Dreams) is next on the queue line. However, I might not start it immediately after The Moomins. I need some time in between to reschedule my priorities!

On the other hand, I've been thinking seriously on having another instagram account for Ayvarith to post some aspects about it since there is no homepage for it yet. Another failure, I know. I have to admit, I do hate building websites! However, this will also mean added pressure, and with the technical problems I do have already with connecting to instagram and posting in it, it is probably better to wait and watch out for the next move. I'm so pressed in time with my photo-processing schemes and duties for the group, as well as my usual daily posts on instagram. In all of this, I'm giving my workplace my back, which I know it does sound dangerous a bit but I can't force myself to respect something that doesn't respect me back.

As I'm typing this, I've received an email informing me that one of my images submitted to HIPA (Hamdan International Photography Award) was qualified after the first round. The image was submitted for the Night Photography category. Meanwhile, my other images for other categories did not pass. The image submitted was Die Kuwaitische Mitternacht, but I had to translate the name into English as per the rules. It is funny that I've submitted my images in a haste just 2 days before the deadline. There was another event I wanted to role into, and also takes place in the UAE, which was an award for achievements done for the Arabic language. My aim was to submit my blog, but I had to back off. I think my blog is relatively new beside the fact that I was not sure of the regulations about electronic contents in that way. I had to let it go for now as I have more important issues to attend to (and ironically one of them is find a topic for my next article for my Arabic blog!).

Die Kuwaitische Mitternacht

Laziness in the meantime comes as an essential part of my life now. I feel that I need it strongly. I just realized that even when I play a game, it comes to me as a "duty" to do and not merely an entertainment to have. I think I've completely lost the definition of "entertainment" in my life…