Heizung…

Supposedly it should have been a quiet and an easy-going summer. Well, I was wrong. Things are going with speed, specifically after the announcement of some Expo for which our group was invited; and it is of a classy type as well. Photos must be chosen carefully. Beside this fact, I've been busy running errands to complete my Visa request to Malta. Quite pressed in time here and I've changed the plans already. Seems that I'm going to divide my was-to-be long vacation into portions of smaller ones to save days and also because of reservations problems in the chosen time. Hence, I'm going to have first a 3-day long leave (followed by a weekend holiday) for my travel to Oman with the group. Then after, I'm going to have to wait till 27^th. I got a nice offer for staying in between this time and up till October 7^th.
This Visa specifically is somehow weird for me to do, as it is a Schengen Area (Malta is a member in the Schengen). No online application, no fees, but a health insurance (!) and I have to fill it on papers. Needless to say that I had to go through a maze just to find the location of the embassy itself! (before this time, in 2010, the Visa request was attained via the Austrian embassy here). As of this moment of writing this blog post, tickets are purchased already via Turkish Airlines (Türkçe Hava Yılları), and I've taken a personal shot for the application. I'm left with the insurance and officially booking the place and, ahem, filling the Visa form!

Expo

Now back to our Expo story. As I said, we received a special invitation and hence the photo pick and sorting is a delicate matter. As of writing these words, the sorting meeting is not yet held, so probably the results will be available by next week's post. Meanwhile, I had to press myself a bit and try hard on fixing some photos and looking for those which I didn't bring to a sorting or filtering meeting before. There is one troublesome issue though: size.
Issues with size require a special crop and I do think that it is better to be done without interpolation; meaning: cropping to the required size without keeping the DPI resolution fixed. Keeping the DPI fixed will create extra pixels to compensate for the lost pixels in between. More to come about that below.

Yggdrasil

Some of the images underwent a critical fix, like Yggdrasil. This panorama was shot back in April in Al-Hamra mall and there were many projections made out of this one. However, one of the most dramatic projections of those was the one used in Yggdrasil. Previously, the panorama was deemed interesting if not for the group of people on the lower left corner which broke the symmetry. I decided to crop out this portion of the panorama ending up removing the whole ground; ironically, no one made a comment about the traces of cloning out the tripod on the ground!

Spider

The final look of the panorama became more as an abstract. Because of the colors tones and the severe chromatic aberrations on edges (mainly because of the high amount of stretch by the projection style), I've decided to change the image totally to B&W to get rid of all that hassle.
Most of the images to be sorted out are panoramas except for one single shot. I wouldn't list all the fixes that were involved with all of them, but let's hope some of them get a pass. The noise level is humongous and that lowers my expectations!

Finale

Printed and Varnished

Here it is finally, one of my favorite shots; printed and varnished! Well, I didn't print it in the original size, otherwise it should be around the size of A4 (210mm x 297mm). I've enlarged the image (keeping the DPI flexible here and not fixed) to the size of, around, A2 (420mm × 594mm). I wished I could enlarge it even further, but I feared the flaws. Keeping the DPI (dots per inch) flexible and not fixed, means that the size of the dots composing the image is changed, while keeping the DPI fixed means that the image had to be interpolated (i.e. follow a specific algorithm) to predict or generate the new dots (or pixels) which would fall in between separated dots (because of the enlargement). Notice that DPI is precisely a measure for the displayed dots on monitor, and for the printing process the resolution that must be used is PPI (point per inch), but eventually despite the difference in their concepts, the two are proportional; changing one will definitely change the other. Beside, controlling the PPI for a printer does require a special RIP (Raster Image Processor).
Changing the size from around A4 to A2 reduced the resolution or the DPI from 300dpi to around 160dpi. Doing the calculations this seemed a fair resolution to view the image from a distance of one meter or so. The print seems clean after all, and the contrast was increased by the varnish. The sepia tone seem to be vibrant even more after the varnish (was much closer to white without the varnish). All what is required now is to deliver this humble print as a gift to the celebrity! I'm not sure how to find him (and surprise him) but I will try to do this ASAP (adding to the burden on my back for this summer!).

Now with all that fuss going on about the vacation and the Expo, it feels like events are taking place in few days from now and not by the end of September (the Expo is in August though). Some are saying the situation is dangerous with all the crazy situation world wide. Well, I will be crazy myself (if I'm not already) if I stayed here without a change in scenery. It is astonishing how your bitter memories turn out to be the sweetest after all. It is time to be isolate, again…