Chaotic Life…

Busy week, and busy health issues as well. I did not feel like typing this blog post really but I'm pushing myself just to get myself out of the circle. Car issues (not over yet with those) occupied my mind (and still) for the past few days and I was not able to work with my camera and incense sticks to apply some ideas that occurred to me.

My new Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM

Moreover, there was a bit of news I was lazy to post about last time, and that is my nifty-fifty lens (Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM) had gone dead with the focusing ring not responding; Not in manual, nor in Autofocus mode. This is one of the critical lenses I have, and having it ready is a must. Thus, I was anticipating in my mind to order a new one and this time it would a 50mm lens but from Canon's L-Series (higher quality and, well, pricey). Unfortunately, though I had to ignore this option when I discovered that the diameter of this lens is 72mm and not 58mm as its cheaper counterpart.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM

This difference will make lot of troubles with my arsenal of filters which I usually purchase based on the 58mm standard, as most of my lenses do have this diameter and some do have step-down or step-up rings for them to attach these filters. Using a step-down ring for 72mm to 58mm is, as far as I know, does not exist and most probably I would need 2 step-down rings (72 to 62 and 62 to 58) and such a setting is not advised for because it might cause more vignetting and probably more flares because the body of the filter would be separated more than usual from the surface of the lens front. Thus, after checking it out, I've finally ordered the same lens I have from a local store (AABWorld) which Ironically offered the lens for $4 less than its price on B&H! I got it delivered on the same day. Man, I'm spending lot of money in this month...

Smoking Smoke

I've posted in my last post here about working with incense sticks and some plans about it but I didn't post any results from that experiment. In fact, my aim in the first place was to do a long exposure with periodic flash bursts from my speedlites and thus making a multi-exposure-like image within one frame and one single exposure (by working in a dark room). However, we are talking here about exposures that might extend to 30 minutes, and the stroboscopic feature in speedlites won't handle this situation properly. Therefore, I was looking for another solution to this. Meanwhile, I was busy the past week in writing a blog post in Arabic for my Arabic blog specifically about this experiment and how I did what I did. See, I was busy!

The set for shooting incense sticks.

Thus, since I couldn't work out my way with such idea, I had to do things digitally, by using the intervalometer and take shots automatically every 30 seconds (I worked with 1 minute as well) just like if I was doing a time-lapse, and then work hard digitally to compose and overlap the images and convey a sense of movement. Well, the end result was actually more surreal and far from being about movement! Yet, I still like it. For fun (probably posted this before?), I've created a reverse time-lapse out of the 80+ shots that I took of the burning incense sticks. I didn't bother to add sound or anything.

My first step in processing this amount of images (more than 80 shots) was to use the Blend technique, in which I would change blend for each layer to merge it in a somewhat similar look to the multi-exposure option in some cameras. Mainly, the Blend option to fit the usage here was the Lighten option.

Emerging Smoke

I have to admit though that the general look might be messy with Emerging Smoke, yet I do like such a mess with its abstract sense and randomness. Notice that the final image was rotated as well to add a bit of mystery to it. The coloring was done digitally of course and I used a simple gradient here close to baby-pink and baby-blue, but I think I should have made the grading softer some more as it appears as if the change was sudden from pink to blue. The smoke here also does have some metallic sense to it, and I think it would be good as a background of some sort. It is already accepted by some stock websites already with its counterpart coming next. One thing to notice here though, the Lighten blend does not work with all kinds of images; Sometimes, if the images are generally bright, the Darken blend would work better, or maybe at times a mix of the two blends would do!

Smokey Carnival

The next play or trick required some special sorting for the images: Only those with longitudinal smoke shapes would be picked for the process. And the process was simply assigning a channel from the RGB spectrum to each layer (consecutively), in addition to some tweaking in contrast, and at a later stage tweaking the colors with Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and voila! We have a Smokey Carnival. I'm not sure how many layers I've used here but it was somewhere between 70 and 80 shots. This combination of images, too, is now available on the stock, and I think it does make another background or backdrop image, or even a wallpaper. Things won't stop at these two, as there are single layers which produced some interesting shapes of smokes that I'm willing to experiment with and add some digital colors to keep things interesting (probably combination of gradations made of complimentary colors). Yet, because of the hectic life issues I'm having currently, I had to stop editing those images and even stop doing some plans with my camera. Let's hope this weekend gives me some breath of life to stand up again.
As I've mentioned earlier, I was thinking of some method to time the speedlite to shoot in specific periods of time with a long exposure (extending to around 30 minutes maybe!), and seems the solution is here finally but I didn't get the chance to try it out yet. Without delving much into the details, it seems that I need to dig out my multi-gate trigger (which works with infrared, laser and sound) and hook it with the system for this experiment. Let's hope I would be able to work with it this week or so and get some good results!

Finale

Well, as you can see here maybe this is kind of a short note of what I've been doing lately with my "life" - if I can call it so. Too bad my mind had been too busy to write or think of some words to jot down or even to look inside myself for feelings to express in a poem. However, in the mid of all of that, I'm keeping a record for some of my thoughts about life on Writing.com and I do post them as well sometimes on Twitter and FB. Anyway, probably not the time to post the link for that for the time being.
Times is ticking away and to be sincere about my feelings, I'm loathing and getting disgusted by every second the ticks while I'm in this place. A place that I call home, or maybe I'm forced to call home. Time passes and I feel more estranged and more isolated. Adding to my eyes trouble that makes driving such a hassle to be aware of, the hassle of dealing with the outside world and with such savage and barbaric creatures that call themselves human beings makes my anger deep inside incremental. So much that I feel like crashing everyone I see in front of me with my car, if I can get the chance to. Probably this is the effect for not traveling out for 3 years... Probably I'm on the verge of forgetting that once upon a time, I was a human being.