Stroll IX…

Well, I think I can say it is officially summer here already, and I have to say goodbye to my plans for strolls in the morning. Fatigue and occupation with other issues at home are keeping me further away from the camera (and I was trying to get closer to it). Actually, I was going to cancel the post for this week but I'm going to try and finish it in time.
Meanwhile, I was busy typing a post for my Arabic blog about pinhole photography; Something I really need to do more (in some creative manner as much as possible).
Anyway, for this post, I'm going to talk about my stroll on April 26ᵗʰ, with my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens and Kodak's infrared filter (87B), which is somewhat like the second part of my previous stroll (Stroll VIII), where the previous one was to the Eastern side of the neighborhood (into another block) while this one was Westward around my neighborhood and in the same block where I live.

Stroll IX

Probably one of the easy aspects of using wide angle lenses is the capability of achieving hyperfocal distance, to have a reasonable depth of field in the image, without even needing to have some form of autofocus (on most occasions). So, for the most part of this stroll, I've fixed the lens on f/8. The hard part though, is to have the proper frame to shoot, but of course we have the crop option in Photoshop later on so it might not be a big deal, unless one is mindful for making use of every pixel in the frame! Anyway, I'm not such a person.

حَيْ
(alive)

As the routine goes by now, I've made some shots just outside my house to test the exposure range and see the quality of the images on LCD. Alive was actually composed of 2 shots and I was lucky to have the light on the pole on in one shot (while off in the other). It was strange also to see such amount of change in shadows between the 2 shots even though they were successive with few seconds separating them. This called for merging the two shots to see what kind of shadows pattern that Photoshop would produce (and also to merge the different perspectives of the 2 images somewhat). 

ساطِع
(bright)

While my destination was westward from home, but at some point I would need to go southward, and that's where I shot Bright facing eastward. Actually this shot was processed at a later time after a number of images in this series. As i worked on it, I started to unravel some details like those lines around the flare. My guess is that such lines are actually caused by the scratches on the gel filter at the back of the lens. One thing I'm surprised to find at the time of typing this blog is the fact that I've shot 2 shots for this scene; one is dark and the other is light and I've processed only the light one. Probably I should try later merging these 2 to have somewhat an average lighting, somewhat like HDR or fake-HDR image. I've spent considerable time as well to lessen the fisheye or barrel distortion for this image, but it wasn't as successful as it would have been done with DxO. Maybe I should work more on such a skill.

The House

Again, I had to visit the infamous (haunted-like) house, well, if it wasn't haunted indeed, but this time with the bucket in front of it being moved from the last time I shot it (with B+W 092 infrared filter!). I wouldn't say there is anything special about this shot except that it looks more haunted in a monochromatic infrared image. Yet, it was a good target to practice rectifying a fisheye image. The curvatures around the center were reduced a bit but I had to crop the image into a square. If this was to be rectified in DxO, the image would be stretched, somewhat with proportions similar to 16:9 or about that. I'm not sure if Photoshop can do something about that, but some tools in Photoshop needs the image to be in 8-bit format instead of 16-bit (where I do most of the work) and hence my only option in the first phase of editing is using Lens Correction option. Maybe newer versions of PS upgraded such option, but I'm not sure.

ظُلْمَةٌ وَنورْ
(darkness and lightness)

Just next to the "haunted house" there was another "haunted" place (pardon me for using the word "haunted" here but this is just my impression). The thing is that such house was like "absent" for me despite the many times I've passed through that path trying to hunt for photos. I'm not sure how come I didn't notice such a house. Anyway, I've taken several shots and combine them in a single one, and probably because of the infrared effect here, the house appeared to be half lit and half dark! I didn't try out my luck with rectifying the distortion here (I got tired I guess), so anyway, I've decided to just crop the image into a square to remove some excess of "data" or unneeded info in the image, while keeping the door centered.

بَـصـيـصْ
(glimmer)

Had a turn then to that "mystic" tree which I've shot before with B+W 092 filter to see how it would show up with such a wide angle lens and such high-threshold infrared filter. Honestly, Glimmer didn't amuse me much like Rubble before, but the walls I guess add some depth to it which was somewhat lacking in Rubble (which was shot with 50mm lens then). Maybe I've made a mistake here for swapping the channels and turning the image into yellowish tint; Probably blue adds more to the mystery. I think that old palm leaf is adding somewhat of a leading or guiding line, though faint. The irony is that it was there when I shot the same scene weeks before that time with B+W 092 filter, but it just didn't show because the lens was 50mm.
Around the end of this little corridor there is a discarded old tire and I did take some shots of that one too but turned out they were shaken. Even though I've made a 3D anaglyph image out of some of them but probably it's not worth posting about here.

جَنوبْ
(south)

The last shot(s) in this series was taken on my way home after wandering about trying to find something interesting (it was still morning time during Ramadhan and so quiet). I didn't find anything interesting so I started to shoot randomly at some light pole with a sign. I can't remember what I was thinking but when I got back home I've realized that these shots can be tried for stitching; and so it was!
Now, because of the extreme distortion on the edges and non-coherent shooting (they were taken at random, and handheld) there was some stitching errors that I've tried to fix. However, the real hurdle was trying to adjust some of the perspective here (specially the tilt in the light poles) for which I used the wrap tool as well as the puppet wrap tool, and the image had to be cropped several times for various reasons (but mainly to remove the flaring sun). I have to thank the flares here that made me interested in creating this shot after all because I was really going to just forget about them. 

Technically, this was the last shot in this stroll. There were few others but I was "playing" and fooling around with my camera, but unlike South, I don't think they were quite interesting to process and post here. I'll check them out later maybe!

Finale

So, this seems to be the last stroll in the list and I'm not sure what to post about next. I do have plenty of images here and there, scattered around and don't belong to a specific series or project (which I should think of doing any time now). For this, I might be absent for more than a week; who knows.
I've merely made it in time for my Arabic blog and posted an article about pinhole photography before the end of May. Now I'm not sure if I can do something for the month of June! I need to scan for interesting topics (at least for beginners) to post about. Otherwise, I will (again) break my resolution of posting at least one post per month in that blog.

Last week I've ran into a serious problem with my modified Canon 7D when I tried to clean the sensor (after spotting many spots in the images). One particular particle didn't move with the usual brushes that I use to clean the sensor. I thought then maybe I should use the swab cleaning kit (which I didn't use in ages) and that's when the disaster occurred, as the swab was apparently expired and should not have been used, and the whole thing deteriorated over the sensor. My trials to clean the sensor further created even worse smudges. Fast forward: All is OK, and the sensor has been cleaned and the camera is working fine.
This issue though made me under somewhat a mental pressure till the moment of typing these words. After the incidence, I've called a camera shot to see if they offer cleaning services, which they do. The center is nearby but the place is quite miserable. Seeing that no one is there to pick me up and I was in a hurry, so I had to drive to there myself. It's a long adventure for me with such eyes but I have to say it delivered such a mental shock and quite lowered my self-esteem with all the fuss that I had to endure. My family "begged" me not to try this again. The next day, my brother picked me to the shop to pick the camera up. My driving limits for the time being is barely to the nearby supermarket to get supplies for the house, and driving to such a busy and narrow place and struggling to find a parking place in that ant-colony was quite a mind straining experience. Now, I can't imagine myself even driving after midnight to do some night photography, which I ever loved to do but didn't do for quite long time by now. 

It all seems like one long nightmare, and I just wish I can wake up at any minute now. My life choices seems to decrease rather drastically on many fronts right now. Recently, all I could think of is to sleep non-stop if I can, whenever I can. I'm losing the taste for it all…