Happy new year, and I hope you had a nice one. To be honest, I wanted to take another week off from typing my blog here but I thought maybe I shouldn't and thought it would be a good idea to stress myself more beside all the things happening in my life right now on the home front. So, here we go.
As a side note, while typing these words, I've already been out in a random shoot in the morning like I would do every winter; around the neighborhood. This time, I've picked my Sigma 12-24mm lens (which is challenging really) but anyway it was a simple stroll around and I'm still "trying" to work on the photos I've shot back then. Hopefully I will talk about them in time but this post is supposed to be following the chronological order so I'm going to take off from where I stopped in the previous post (well, the previous previous post). However, before I proceed, I'd like to give just a liiiiittle announcement.

Little Announcement

I've recently uploaded a full set of images which was a project initiated in 2021 but didn't get to finish it (let's speak procrastination here) except in 2022. Long story short, after sending emails to the major stocks i deal with, I've uploaded this set to Canstockphoto and Dreamstime. However, to my surprise (and for some reasons beyond my humble understanding), Dreamstime did accept some images (about half of the set) and refused the rest and it seems for reasons related to quality; despite the fact that all images are the same with only one element that had changed.
This said, I've tried to delete what had been already accepted in my profile on Dreamstime (i.e. what had been accepted from this set of images, 39 of them) but I could only delete few. When I inquired about it, I got the response that I have to wait for 6 months until I can delete these files (Why? Just because…). Digging through the website further it turned out that it got itself wrapped up in political views that i think are not supposed to be there in such a website that offers art in the first place.

For these reasons, and despite having a profile there (and I can't withdraw anything from there), I've decided to stop uploading to Dreamstime completely. It's a loss for sure as it provides exclusive rights to images and I do have some exclusive images there, but such terms and also getting into the political issues for no reason, such issues are a red flag to me. Thus, I will stop uploading my work there completely but my profile will be active still. Who knows, might be deleted one day.

Meanwhile, the set of 39 images, which I've called Arabic Eye, is available on Canstockphoto.

Dewy

So, now, to the bulk of today's post! Now, before the main thing, I did take some shots and even edited some shots from the past but it's not the topic of this post. Some of the shots taken were simply for embracing my (new) window which I just like to gaze at in the morning when the light comes in, specially in winter time. Anyway, away with that.

This "experiment" (if I can call it so) was somewhat a "two birds taken down with one stone"; if that's clear anyway! I wanted to do some macro experiment (away from bougainvillea and picking the flowers of the poor bush), and in the same time I was looking for ideas for my Arabic blog as I didn't post anything for a while, and my thoughts led me to make an article about Super-Resolution (SR) images and how to do them in Photoshop. So, the two ideas combined into some macro job in Super-Resolution; What was missing though is a proper target. Chasing my tail again looking for ideas, I arrived (again) at my beloved colored feathers, which I didn't use for a while (maybe since 2020 or 2021) for any photo-shoot.

نَـدِيْ
(dewy)

I'd say, initially, it was a success. For creating a SR image, one wouldn't need a lot of images like in the focus-stacking technique. In Dewy, around 13 shots were taken. The problem here though, because I've sprinkled water (plain water, no glycerine added), the droplets on the feather wouldn't stay in place completely but some (just some) of them did move a bit. Originally, in fact, I wanted a simple one droplet to be stable on the tip but (surprise surprise) that nearly impossible, so I sprinkled the whole feather with water. Anyway, the movement in the water droplets between shots (even though they were taken quickly, relatively) - all was fixed in the process of merging and also some extra job was done with Photoshop magic (cloning, and stuff, you know). The dimensions with this technique ramped up from the typical 5184X3456 pixels for Canon EOS 7D (my camera) up to 10386X6929 pixels; So that's like double the original resolution. Of course, things had to be taken down, like cropping and other cleaning stuff and sharpening. Increasing the resolution in that technique is "somewhat" good, but not "absolutely" good. 

نَـدِيْ 2
(dewy 2)

Of course, I wouldn't let things go without playing around with the colors, like in infrared. I went on to do some color inverse and I think the color cast is still impressive. However, I must mention here that this is just one of the things that I've experimented with in this image. The main issue here is that I've tried to put my vision as a person who reads from right-to-left (normally, I guess); Thus, to me, the image seemed more "normal" to my eyes if I just flipped it horizontally and let the lines going from the bottom right to upper left corner. I kept the original orientation as it will be seen with Dewy 3.

نَـدِيْ 3
(dewy 3)

As for Dewy 3, it was actually a direct edit for one of the shots that made up the original SR-image (which was cropped later to make Dewy 1 and 2). Here, you can see the original orientation of the image as it was shot. Worth noting that the shot was done with 50mm lens and 36mm extension tube, and at f/22; So, nothing fancy here and no focus-stacking (that was not the aim to begin with). If I would go for focus-stacking I'd probably use more zoom power via lens reversing technique. These images gained some nice momenta on YouPic (specially Dewy 1). Nice to see such a simple experiment go wild like that. I still need to work on more though.
After this I've done some little shy shots with a leaf from one of the basil plants in the yard (didn't want to upset the bougainvillea again!) and I'm not sure if I'm going to post about them here as they were just simple shots with various zooms (exceeding the 1X limit). They got some nice details to them though. We'll see…

PSAChina

Here, I just wanted to put a little announcement about the results that I've got from participating in PSA China contest. The contest had its deadline in December, and the results were announced on January 3ʳᵈ. I have to say, for the majority of my entries, the results were disappointing. Yet, just by the last category, Architecture, I've had a surprising swift turn of luck!

Results report card

Out of the 4 entries for the Architecture category, I won 1 gold medal and 2 honorable mentions. Even though the last image is not awarded anything but it gained enough points to be "accepted" and exhibited. In fact, I've received another email asking me to upload the bigger files for all these images, beside a personal photo and some text about these images. It seems that the judges at PSA China contest do appreciate panoramas pretty much unlike other contests I've been into before (specially the Trierenberg Circuit which was ended in 2021 or 2022 already). This makes me happy, as well as sad, because it reminds me of the fact that I didn't do much panoramas for a long time now (for reasons beyond my reach already). Just to finalize this, here are the images that were accepted (and awarded):

 One thing I'm hoping for here, and that is to receive my gold medal, unlike the one that I've never received from Trierenberg Circuit back in 2018 (which was my first gold medal ever in any such contest, and this one now is my second).

Finale

I was hesitant to type this post and was afraid that I wouldn't finish it in time, but here I am. Things on the home front had been very disturbed; No maid to help with the housework and tend to Mom, and a challenging Mom on various levels with health issues, a household that doesn't feel like home, and coping with mood swings and depression, trying to think hardly about the camera to find some kind of salvation through it. I've honestly lost a lot of appetite for everything (beside food, and the camera work). Spending my day just thinking if this is going to end at all at some point, and whether it was all my fault to be here in this position and place. It's a blame game with myself, and trying hard to convince myself that I've done my best whenever I could.
Traveling is quite essential at such a time but with the world going crazy and with my eyes condition (which apparently is going down even though not as bad as my other siblings) - such conditions are just not quite encouraging. Sure, I can travel to well-known destination and sure I can just travel to get some breath away from this house, but I always feel it is a money wasted if such a travel wasn't for a solid purpose (like a religious pilgrimage for example) or without my camera. I didn't shoot any panoramas in ages and my current results from PSA China contest were quite encouraging to do something, but where and how, this is way beyond my thinking at the moment. It does feel as if my life is getting isolated more and more by every passing day, and soon, my life would be no life at all. I wonder where is that light at the end of the tunnel that everyone is talking about…