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…

Rolled…

I was really reluctant to type this blog post and I was going to let it be an off-week again, but then I thought maybe I should talk a bit about some of the old images made anew with new processing techniques. But then, I've realized that there is just a tiny pocket of new images that had been taken in the past 2 or 3 months that I've never posted anything about.
I have to admit that I've been lazy with my camera; No motivation whatsoever to even touch it. Anyway, from time to time I would just pick the camera and take a "snap" shot here and there, just because. So, some of the images that will be posted in here don't have any big story behind them, mostly, but merely snap shots and a story of processing…

Roll

So, in case you read my previous post, you did probably see the "king series". During the make of this series which took a span of several days of course (depending on the influx of ideas into my head), there had been some snap shots here and there as I was trying to grease my mood and appetite for photography, again and again.

سُجودْ
(prostration)

Not surprisingly, many of such ideas occur at or after midnight when everything goes quiet in this house. My sleeping pattern during the COVID-19 crisis had been up and down; Once regular, and many times out of sync. Because of coffee abuse I literally drink one mug and just fall asleep right away. Anyway, in one of those nights, I thought of shooting سَجودْ, Arabic for prostration. This kind of shots is not new really, but I'll talk about the story behind this in a bit. It was shot with my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens, and as you might have guessed already, there was a lot of crop that had been done beside "coloring" or burning parts in the background to hide them. The reason for picking this lens and not any other wide angle lens (e.g. Voigtländer 20mm f/3.5) is the type of distortion that I wanted to apply here, and also the size of the lens so I can place the camera between my legs as I prostrate (my Sigma DG 12-24mm is bulky for such a job!). Despite being somewhat stable, I was actually planning for some tiny movements and that's why I did lengthen the exposure a bit (by adding +2EV) but anyway, with a fisheye lens, movements can be barely visible and this is natural with most wide angle lenses (talking about small movements or shakes here). The rest of the job is, of course, just a story of processing and converting to B&W, and rotating the image upside down. Controlling the light and dark areas was a delicate matter here.

تَسْبيحْ
(glorification)

The shot above, سُجودْ, is in fact a result of pondering at an older shot, تِسْبيحْ (glorification), which was shot with my Huawei Mate 9 phone. It was a long exposure shot, and in my Huawei there are a number of options that would stylize such a long exposure, besides it's light to use and quick (just needed my mini-tripod to put it in front of me). The resolution of the shot, of course, is not comparable to that of a DSLR, specially that the image is done in JPEG and not RAW. Anyway, some user on YouPic noted that "he" can take that photo with DSLR and started to list his gear and whatever that is. Tried to make him understand that I do indeed have the gear required, but it's something done in a whim; Not everything should be professional and done with hi-tech gear. Well, seems he didn't get the idea anyway. But that actually sparked in me the idea of shooting another shot of a similar type. Still, though, I didn't use ND filters with سُجودْ (as he suggested).

Perspective

Then, there was this shot which was done… in the sink of my bathroom. The situation was shaky, I admit; I feared any water drops from the faucet onto the lens, but miraculously, it didn't. Again, Rokinon 8mm fisheye came to the rescue, and again, of course, the final image needed some crop to remove the unneeded edges here. I've placed the camera on a towel at the base of the sink and I've used that to pull it left and right and shoot. It was hard to put that one image that covers my face perfectly, so I kept on shooting and pulls the towel to one direction just a bit and shoot again, and so on. All shots were bracketed for HDR merging later on, so the one you see here, Perspective, is tone-mapped from a HDR slide in fact. In tone-mapping I tried to be moderate as much as possible and still give that grungy (dramatic) look to the image without going crazy with the sliders! I thought also that the blue tint would give it that "medical" or hospital-atmosphere that I usually see in horror movies (I don't watch movies anyway so I might be wrong here). Anyway, the blue tint serves the mood better here more than a warm tone would. Later on, I've even created some anaglyphs out of the shots.

The fun continued (in some other day) and AGAIN, with my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens. I guess you can tell already how much I love this lens despite my fail in adapting it to some of my landscape shots when I used to travel! Nevertheless, the distortion it provides, does add such a dramatic tension to the image (well, if used correctly and thoughtfully).
So, I picked this lens again and went on trying to find some interesting venture to shoot, and i decided to do some camera motion (again).

So, nothing really special about these shots except for the abstract and I'm actually thinking now to upload them to some stocks. All what was needed here is to fix the exposure time to 1 or 2 seconds, just enough to rotate the camera in my hand for a full circle. As for the colors here (despite shooting the same subject under the same lighting conditions), this is just a change of the white balance (probably when processing the RAW files). More work was done to fix the exposure actually as the images were originally brighter than this (and softer).

Infrared Craze

Been months now with the lock-down (it's easing now but my schedule didn't really change much here) and I got into the habit of going out in the yard to read a book under the sun in the early morning before it gets scorching hot. I also water the plants and all of that; A daily routine (almost). Anyway, there was a time when I wanted to write a post for my Arabic blog about infrared (part 2) and just needed some infrared shots to explain some aspects about this art. So, after doing the "innocent" stuff for that blog post, I've found myself roaming and playing around with these infrared selfies, and I kind of created a path or a style for me here that I might try on other images (portraits and other).

The general aspects of this style are:

• Raise the brightness (by exposure or brightness sliders or even Fill) but without going off the histogram.
• Raise the blacks just to show outlines (or until it kisses the left side of the histogram).
• Maybe just lower the saturation to near B&W. 
• Outside the RAW editing window, the pupils are kept as black as possible with selective (layer masks) editing techniques.

The rest, then, is just a work of contrast (which I would probably set before doing the above adjustments), beside fixing the white balance and other color issues. So in a sense, it is kind of a synthetic high-key done after the fact instead of with speedlites or strobes in a studio. It is important though to realize that the less shadows are there, the better. I've tried this technique already with some older shots done indoors, and the results were not up to the level, but I'll keep trying anyway and see!

Finale

Well, I guess I better make this short at this point. There are some few shots that I did want to talk about but probably I'll keep them for later for now - along with a probable discussion for another style of editing. We'll see if I get the time to do that post in the future!
On a side note, it seems I've totally forgot to mention this item of news, and that is two of my images had been accepted in 16th PSAChina international exhibition of photography, and I've received some emails to provide the original images for display in the exhibition. That does not mean that I've won any award, but simply that these images did pass the judgement or critique and deemed worthy of display. I didn't get involved in any contest for a long time and probably I will not do so in a long time as well, but this display do give me a bit of spark.

The two accepted images: (left) Anxiety, (right) Houdini.
Worth noting that Houdini was marked as inspirational on YouPic as well.

It seems that, at this point, that YouPic can be somewhat an aid for me to judge my images in the future and see what to submit to contests, though I know this approach is not quite accurate, simply because professional photographic circles do not work in that manner, and YouPic is still, after all, a social media website and not a circle of professional photographers whose job is to critique. You can critique on YouPic but I doubt people there would welcome that anyway specially if not asked for it.
Anyway, after receiving the email about the pick, I was asked to submit the originals (for printing I suppose) plus a personal photo. I did all of that, but now, I'm not sure what's next. Would I receive an online catalog (like most contests)? Are my images considered or classified as Honorary Mention? I'm not sure, but we'll see. I might receive some other email containing the catalog. It's funny though to know that both of these images are actually selfies or self-portraits!
On the other hand, there had been some few incidents with my workplace that I didn't talk about before probably but amazingly I'm discovering new things about my life and the whole thing called "work" at this point and this stage. I've realized that some people are simply annoying or causing problems even more when they are further away (and work online)! i kind of feel sicker of my workplace at the moment despite the fact that I didn't go there for months (except for 2 days back in July). This calls my brain again to find a substitute, but as always, most probably the search end up with nothing and be in vain.
As I'm getting closer and closer to 40 (in less than 2 weeks time), I'm looking back at what I've achieved and what not. Some say I've done a lot, yet I don't really see it. They say that 40 is a new time or a new age, and it's like opening a new page of life, and again, I don't see that coming. Maybe I don't want to see? Maybe. However, I'm trying to keep it as real as possible. One of my simplest dreams was to have my own family and stay away from this problematic house and build myself up as I like, yet, all my attempts failed miserably. And reaching 40 does not make the process or the thought of it any better. In fact, I've already abandoned such an idea already and I think I better be on my own. All what I need for now is a home; A place I can call home.