Alexander 6, V85.

 It's here! I can't believe it! The lab(s) that intimidated me for very long time are finally here stitched like a piece of cake! HAHA!

Well, for the time being only one is ready and the work is still going on on the other. The one made ready for today is the Anti-Compton lab. This lab is a small narrow space with one big device occupying one of the walls and closets occupying the other walls. I tell you, while shooting this, I had a hard time rotating my body with the camera.

Now the main work was to clear the bottom edge of the panorama itself, or the nadir area. The Nadir was a hard task to do and finally I decided not to add it. I'm trying at the current time to learn now to add simply a white space with the title of the image and my name at the bottom. It sounds easy really but still, I can't figure it out. Rather, I've duplicated the panorama layer and simply flipped it vertically and pulled it down to be in the place of the current nadir. It gave out some wonderful shapes though!




Now it's the time to attack the 2 remaining panoramas; the gamma lab and the office. Anyway, the first one is finished with only some color adjusting is needed, almost, while the other one needs a heavy work which I just don't know how to start with, mainly because it contains a moving object, added for a purpose. Me.

Now with a VR head, I get even more possibilities to snap places that I thought would never be possible to catch at all! Specially those nasty narrow places and/or those with checkered pattern, like the anti-compton above or the gamma lab. I think I'm lucky that my fisheye lens doesn't require much adjustments for its rotation axis on the VR head, because the default, initial, conditions for setting up the VR head are valid from the beginning. Just make the front of your lens meet up the base of the VR head (above it) and here you go. I need to work more to get my hands used to it. Doing things fast is always something I seek. It's bad, but in a country like this, where everyone with a camera is considered a paparazzi and not allowed to go into many places, I have to learn how to snap quick and accurate as much as possible, even if it was a shoot for HDR. Things might not be different with panoramic shooting. I've already worked on fast-rhymed panoramas specially when I went to Ireland, when I snapped some places and I was afraid that I was bugging other tourists who were waiting for me to get the hell out of the place, or me being afraid that they would come in and ruin what I was doing! In a fast-rhymed panorama, I used to work with my simple tripod alone with no VR head and all the fuss, or in many times, simply using my head and rotating my body with the camera. Back in Ireland I had some control over my camera and I kind of gained some stability with my body, but coming back to Kuwait ruined all of that!
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2017. Alexander remained for three days in bed
2018. he could barely move inside the small house
2019. and he felt well after that and got out of the house
2020. then he paid a visit with Kaliván to the tree
2021. and he asked Kaliván: why this tree is so important?
2022. we could have cut her down from the beginning!
2023. and Kaliván answered: this tree bears the holy seeds,
2024. it is what keeps this valley alive as it is now,
2025. and if it dies out, then no green you shall see here
2026. then Alexander asked: but now it is without branches,
2027. how it will give the holy seeds without branches?
2028. then Kaliván answered: here comes your part O hero,
2029. Aramramátáníth said you will heal the Jawsamályá again,
2030. and it will give fruit just like before and be always green
2031. then Alexander wondered: why me? Aram... couldn't heal it?
2032. Kaliván answered with eyes to the sky: you cannot say it yet?
2033. she ordered me to tell you that, but I do not know why,
2034. although I am sure she has the power to heal the tree,
2035. but yet she told me to ask you to try your luck with it!
2036. Alexander wondered about this argument
2037. and then started to think how to balance Jawsamályá
2038. the tree looked poor and pale without any branches
2039. thus Alexander thought of restoring its branches back
2040. so he ordered Kaliván and his Cadid to collect branches

Alexander 6, V84.

 I've determined to break the spell of Mondays this Monday, but I'm not sure I'm succeeding with this or not! So far, not much annoyances!
I've finally signed for my leave, for 33 days (including holidays and weekends, which will be added back to my leave's account later on). It shall start from September 26th till October 28th. I will be back to Kuwait, hopefully after spending the vacation in Ireland then, by the 16th, and hence I would have 12 free days to spend around here before starting to work by November. Just like the last year. It was a real mess to ask for this leave because of the stupidity hovering over this place; some people do it by paper and some people (like me) must do it electronically in this damned system. Last year, when I signed for such leave from work, they dropped down the salaries of 3 months in advance into my account, and that made me some troubles in some aspects. All the fuss was to make sure that I get my salary regularly as it should be. I really don't know who makes such stupid laws!!! Be sure if I knew him or her, I'm going to assassin them.

Spent my day yesterday downloading the pictures of the panoramas taken from the labs and my office. Also, I took several free images from the outside of my building which is now like a battle field with all the reconstruction work going on and all the bricks been thrown away and made into piles and hills in front of my work place! The total number of images exceeded 300!
Coming to measure it:

• Each row needs 12 angular shots.
• Usually, 3 vertical angles needed.
• Not always but count it in, one zenith and one nadir shot, total 2 (and can be 4).
• We have here 3 rooms.
• Going to shoot into HDR, means we need exposure bracketing, and that means 3 shots in each angle.
• Total: 12x3x3(HDR) + (2x3) = 114 shots. For one room. All 3 rooms then are 114 x 3 = 342 shots.

Adding also those tiny shots I took from the outside which I can't remember how many, then I would say it easily exceeded 350 shots. All in RAW format (to allow me for more manipulations before merging into HDR, specially when it comes to the White Balance factor). Because of this, a 8GB CF memory card is essential!

The process of stitching was fair and went smoothly, even for the narrow lab or what we call here the "anti-compton" lab, after a device of this time. The main work now is to enhance the zenith and the nadir, which are naturally, almost always hard to stitch. In fact in the 2 labs panoramas, I've taken the nadir but I decided not to put it on the stitching process. The best thing to do probably is to clean the nadir BEFORE the stitch. I find cleaning AFTER the stitching process is over is a bit hard to do because of the wide are and the stretching that occurs naturally for the bottom of the image (because of the spherical projection of course). Usually what you see in QTVRs is that the artists put or fix some sort of a label including the name of the artist and the location and/or the date of creation. Maybe I should do this and spare myself the headache, even though I don't know how, still.
So far though, I got 2 tiny problems. The first was that in shots taken at a lower angle (pointing the camera downward that is), parts of the tripod shown up and hence, we have to do some cleaning and cloning job here. The second one is some weird artifacts occured in the Gamma Lab panorama, and they looked very much like parallax errors, but some inspection into that revealed to me that for some reason (and maybe it is even my own mistake when the shoot was on), some slices of the panorama were having a lower range of exposure (i.e. darker) from the other slices surrounding it, thus when the computer blends in together all the slices and trying to find a suitable blend, you get smudges that would look like more like breaks or like some ink plots. To fix this problem I opened those slices individually, and opened some adjacent slices for comparison, I then raised the exposure value for these dark slices to match the adjacent slice, as much as possible. The process was "fine" but issued some noise that I need to smooth out later on, after tone-mapping.
There were also some weird noise not related to the problem above, appeared as some pink spots on some various areas. This problem occured mainly after tone-mapping, but hopefully it is easy to eliminate.

Can't wait to leave this office and get back to work on these panoramas. The real challenge now is the office panorama, in which I included myself in. A moving object in a panorama shoot is not a sweet topic, at all!
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1993. Alexander felt a headache and looked around hime
1994. he recognized that he is in a small house made of wood
1995. then he looked at Kaliván and said: where am I?
1996. Kaliván replied: in my humble house O hero!
1997. then Alexander asked: what happened?
1998. Kaliván then went on telling the story
1999. "you made the Mikanazzar fly away from the tree,
2000. and when it got angry it attacked you with rage,
2001. thus it passed through your heart and body,
2002. and took some of your power and made you weak,
2003. and you fell down and fainted with no power to move,
2004. thus Aramramátáníth chased after Mikanazzar,
2005. and she banished him out of the valley for now,
2006. then she endowed you with some power to heal,
2007. you will need some time to rest for now,
2008. she ordered me to take you home and care for you,
2009. until you become sound again, she shall talk to you,
2010. Oh! what a great honor is that to have her talk to you!
2011. you must be someone special O good king!"
2012. with a little headache Alexander asked Kaliván
2013. "you brought me to your home? how that is possible?"
2014. and Kaliván answered him with a laughter
2015. "thank your Cadid, he is a loyal servant for you,
2016. I released his chains and he helped me"

Alexander 6, V67.

 It was a busy day indeed. I'm signing off from work earlier today, so I'm posting this as early as possible.
It was a weird day by its beginning... I didn't hear the alarm, No gas station was working fine while my gas tank was on "E" and drove all the way to work fearing it would stop suddenly. I filled it later anyway.
After arriving to work I've began putting samples into the freeze dryer at once, and then went out to fill some gas and when I came back I worked with my camera to snap some labs, as I've promised my boss.
The first lab was actually a narrow space and I'm still not sure that it would work fine anyway, but let's hope it will. In a narrow space, the chances for a parallax error increases, specially that I'm not using any specialized head for panoramas. However, it went on fine so far, but the real stuff will show up when I get back home and upload the images to my PC.
After finishing from this lab, or what we call sometimes, the anti-compton lab after a big device in this room, I moved to another room which actually was not planned for the shoot, but my colleague was working on the proposed lab that my director wanted me to shoot, so I took the chance now to try out my mini-tripod for real. I've never did before, but however, I'm not losing anything; if it worked, excellent, if not, I'm not bothering with it.
Thoughts went on and on for how to work with this mini-tripod now. The thing is that the body of the camera and lens together might make the legs not stable and eventually the mini-tripod would fall down altogether. Because of this, shooting in portrait position was not possible. Moreover, the room, or which we call the "sample room", is full of tables in the middle with samples and containers upon them, and that alone was  problem to shoot a panorama that way. I took the risk however, and mounted the mini-tripod with the camera fixed (with the remote which we shall always use) and I went over the tables! Thank God no one saw me there; I'm not ready for unnecessary comments.
In order to rotate the camera here of course, we cannot do it as it is the case with any big tripod, but instead, I had to rotate the whole legs of the tripod in a circular motion and keeping an eye on the front of the lens to measure, visually, a proper amount of angle to shoot. Of course I was using my fisheye lens here. Also, for easiness of use, I put a little bit of vaseline on the base of each leg, just a little bitty bit, for easiness of movement and to reduce the friction. I was planning on making some sort of disk with a scale to see how much I'm rotating my mini-tripod, but after thinking about it, it might be enough to check for this visually, for now at least. I had another idea though of how to make sure that the mini-tripod doesn't move so much off the center while rotating (that is the center of the first shot before rotating). Mainly, I think a thread and a coin would do. I can attach a thread to the bottom of the mini-tripod and let it down on a coin and make the thread be somehow on the center of the coin. By this while rotating and keeping an eye on the thread and the coin, we would somehow make some stability in position here, but not completely though. In stitching, the software is sometimes impowered with algorithms to compensate for such shift in position, but if such shifts are so large, then no use I can say.
Shooting then was completed in two rows; one as horizontal as it could be (since the mini-tripod has no scales) and the other row was done elevating the camera little bit. Finally, a zenith was taken.
The awkward thing about this experiment is that, when I elevated the level of the camera by some degree, I was not able to check the LCD screen to see for myself the cursors of the exposure brackets. Thus, I changed from completely Manual mode (where I stabilize the aperture and change the shutter speed), to Av Mode (automatic choice for the shutter accordingly). Another thing that was frustrating is to walk behind the camera on those tables filled with containers (and some glassware that I was about to break down with my feet!). Mainly, I was afraid that some part of my body would get captured while shooting because of the horizontal wide range of the fisheye lens, and I had to try as much as possible to be behind the camera and never beside it. Because of all of this fuss, I'm not sure this would be a good panorama, but it is something we can learn from at least!

Right, now I have to complete my work with the slideshow for a friend! 6 slides and almost took all day!

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1585. then Alexander asked Biryári: and where to go next?
1586. I do not know the lands, and I do not know my destination
1587. the old man then thought for some time and then he said
1588. "be my guest tonight, and I shall look in my old books,
1589. I might find the answers that you need for such questions"
1590. then Alexander said: and what about my Charnagút?
1591. Biryári replied: I shall search for it in the books as well,
1592. this weird looking sword certainly has a purpose in life
1593. thus the two agreed that Alexander shall rest that night
1594. and the food was prepared for the Cadid outside the hut
1595. while Alexander exchanged the ropes with chains
1596. and prepared some herbs by the help of the wife
1597. to treat the eye of the Cadid that was damaged before
1598. and the wife took care of his bed and prepared it
1599. while Alexander slept on it with the first hour of the set
1600. he felt like his backbone is going into pieces
1601. and his muscles felt the stream of blood rushing through
1602. Alexander did not have a night like this for months
1603. and never felt a bed other than the sands for months
1604. while the old man sat alone with his books
1605. flipping through the pages of the written history
1606. under the light of his little burning candle
1607. and he spent hours reading and reading
1608. until he raised up with a surprise on his eyes