T-Shirt, Anyone?

They have been rough 2 or 3 weeks. Starting from the monodrama festival, to processing the images and submitting them to the contest, and ending with the current situation of sleeplessness. Unfortunately, we are supposed not to expose our images which are submitted for the contest at least till the time of the expo and the gallery of these images, which would fall by the last week of May! Thus, I wouldn't want to risk leaking some images here! However, there is one show specifically that I think I would be able to share some shots from. I wanted to include the snaps from this show into the contest in the beginning but it seems most of the snaps were not properly focused, beside the decor didn't help much (it got into the way of the composition of most shots) - while cropping would be severe.

This show was entitled Al-Jazzár [الجزار], i.e. The Butcher. I'm revisiting the snaps from this show to extract more if possible. There is always hope in shaky images when it comes to a small size view; accompanied with good deal of noise reduction and added sharpness. These two operations are easily done with not much loss when the image is in a small size (both images were taken around ISO2500). However, for the contest I've been told that the minimum resolution was 7MP (but later after submitting I've been told it's 2MP), so I started to minimize down to that limit (after cropping) and try to work on cleaning and enhancing. Some images were as good as 12MP (down from 18MP) after cropping, yet I had to sacrifice all of that for the easy processing. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the results of the judges. The leader of our photography group is one of the judges as well and hence he did not help any of us in picking the proper images as we usually do with him before contests.

However, since judging was supposed to take place last Saturday, I happened to ask him later about the results and he said the process is ongoing still and it is taking a long time because of some technical problems (mainly concerning the TV on which the images are displayed). All I can do is wait! Meanwhile, I'm just digging these old photos and converting some to B&W with and without tone-splitting, or revisiting the snaps taken from the latest Mawahb expo (Mawahb 5), and even the former one, (Mawahb 3), which was held in 2013.

The t-shirt snapped from the website.
The actual name for the panorama
was Oriental Lights. However,
for cultural reasons, the name
was changed to Enlightement,
which is the name given to the
horizontal format of this panorama.
Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile some good news are coming along the way! It is finally here! A t-shirt bearing my own panorama printed by Worthwhile Wears (Instagram: @worthwhilewears). Well, I didn't imagine myself doing an ad campaign but here you go! You can get it from their website here. I'm up to see if they need more shapes and styles of various panorama in my arsenal.
Also, it happened this week that I might have actually gained my first customer over to do a commercial panorama. I wouldn't have gotten to that without the help of the founder of our group, since he has been long in the business and made various connections. It is a cautious step forward, as we are trying to build a portfolio, and establish a line of business not well-known in the area around here. My technical mind on the go right now as I'm typing these words, as I'm trying to figure out the possible hardships on location and putting forward a plan to solve them. However, some failures in the future seem to be a must in such field, because this seems to be the only way to learn! I can't deny that it does bear some stress along with it in the process, but I think it is the only way for the time being to maintain a value of myself instead of stinking myself in a stupid workplace that I've spent 6 years of my life just to get a certificate to work in, and then treated like a janitor.

Summer is already starting to scorch my body, announcing a boring season, and an annoying one too. I didn't put any plans yet for any traveling abroad, but first I need to do some official papers, and  I can't help but to act lazy in such weather. I've been sleeping my weekend, literally, instead of going out at least once (usually on Fridays). I need to spark myself somehow to do all of that work… oh Winter, how much I miss you…