+5…

Did I pass 2 weeks already without blogging? I guess! I really didn't count the days. I've been under pressure lately which made me unable to do much even with editing my old photos. The largest portion of this stress has passed (somewhat) already, but some deal of it remains still. More about that a bit later.
I don't think I will be posting much in this post except for an announcement, and as I go on, I might think of posting a bit further about some of my latest edits!

Announcement

I think I've mentioned in previous posts about new uploads to Mostphotos. So, here it is, I've uploaded about 3 new panoramas (plus 2, adding to 10 panoramas uploaded months back). So, the total right now is at 15 panoramas at large sizes, suitable for printing as fine art pieces. I think I didn't post much about these extra 5 panoramas, so I'll try to do so here right now. 

Failakan Sunset

Earlier (as in last month or before!) I've added Failakan Sunset  to Mostphotos (exclusively), and it is an old (half-way) panorama shot over a ramp, which is used to slide boats to the water, on Failaka island. It was taken in 2012. I say "half-way" here as it was not a full panorama, but merely 2 rows was shot, and the third one was not shot (probably because at that time it was getting pretty dark on this depopulated island). Originally done in HDR, but this time it is done with singles of RAW files; All edited and stitched. Of course the colors are edited here and in fact they caused me a problem because when merging layers the appearance of the image would change drastically. I had to re-work the colors after merging (and at 100% zoom to ensure the accuracy of the colors). At 300 dpi, the panorama is close to 102cm by 36cm. I think if I was to print this panorama I would print it on a glossy material, preferably metal. Just one must be careful about the reflections from light fixtures. 

Entry
(Slí Isteach)

Then I added Entry, or as I like to call it in Irish: Slí Isteach. This is a panorama shot in 2014 inside a little defensive tower in the remains of Aughnanure castle in Oughterard, Co. Galway. It was my 3^rd time in Ireland, and my 2^nd time in Aughnanure (the first being in 2009). Generally speaking, this projection is relatively new for this panorama. I did many projections and styles out of this panorama, but this is the first time I do a simple vertical one like this, and centering it at the door. At 300 dpi, this panorama is almost 33cm by 75cm. I had to crop quite a portion to balance the image here and remove unnecessary or incomplete details. I would consider printing this on glossy metal but one has to be careful with the lighting surrounding this; Otherwise it would turn just like a reflective mirror with such dark areas. If one would want to go safe with this one, matte never hurts anyone!

Solar Towers

Then, we have Solar Towers, which took me quite some time to put the keywording for, and I'm not sure why. I think I was passing through some "mind-boggling" phase or something. Anyway, I did the keywording after all and here it is. Of course this is an old panorama and it was done in HDR before but this time, like the rest in this series, it is stitched out of single RAW files. The projection here, though, is the new thing as I didn't do such a projection before out of this panorama specifically. I had some struggles of course with the tripod and its shadows (like in the original) and I had spent quite some time fixing it. At 300 dpi, the size is about 42cm by 76cm. I tend to think that glossy printing of this one would add to the vibrancy of the blue tones and adds more overall contrast.

Beyond Abzu

I rolled back in time and checked some of these winter adventures I did back in 2012, and found some worthy stuff (but with a great deal of post-processing work and fixing), such Beyond Abzu here. Beyond Abzu was one of my first night panoramas and I still remember that cold winter night when my feet got frozen by the cold water. As the processing went on, the general tint of the image got green and that inspired a sense of mystery in me, hence the name Abzu (also Apsu) which is the name of the primitive waters, supposedly, from which the world was created in Sumerian myths. In some way, the whole surrealism in this panorama was pointing to that meaning in my head so I gave it that name. At 300 dpi, the panorama is about 37cm by 85cm, and I would go with a glossy print for this one though I would fear for the level of noise here to be exaggerated. I worked on cleaning the noise moderately because there is a limit, after which details might disappear. However, this panorama still bear some dark aspect and dark areas might work as mirrors in glossy prints,specially metallic ones. But I would imagine it would be so vibrant if printed on metal!

Return to Nammu

Lastly, there is Return to Nammu which I consider like Part-2 of Beyond Abzu. In time, these two panoramas are not far off; Both were shot in the same winter, and both in January of that year. However, with Return to Nammu, the sky was a bit darker than in Beyond Abzu specifically because I shot this facing the sea and the moon and the city lights were relatively further away. This allowed for some star constellations to appear in the sky in the original shots and here I tried to process the panorama and clean the noise without touching the stars. Thus, they appear in the original panorama, despite being shot within the vicinity of the city, but only when zoomed in at 100%. Unlike Beyond Abzu though, this one looks quite colorful, and yet mysterious a bit because of the dark night element and the stars, and that moon that shines like a rising sun (but in the middle of the night!). At 300 dpi, the size is about 85cm by 38cm. Print-wise, I guess it would do good in glossy as well as matte. The green hue here, as I see it, would be a vibrant one on a glossy media, specially a metallic one. 

Well, this is for now 5 new uploads to my Mostphotos, which are exclusive to Mostphotos. The links are up there to visit the profile or the specific images, in case you are reading this and wish to get one of these.
My capabilities right now are not quite aligned to provide such printing services and shipping, so I let these images to be purchased on their own as big original files in JPEG format to be printed on whatever the client would like.

Finale

Well, probably I can't get on so much with this post but I believe the announcement above and the details mentioned are just about enough in length for this post; Let's not make it longer!
I am currently on a leave from work for 2 weeks but not for resting or fun, but rather for stress and tracking. After a long wait, I've finally received my "disability certificate" which took a bit more than 2 weeks actually, and finally I was ready to submit my request for a grant of medical retirement from my workplace. But things weren't easy as I hoped for; Suddenly, solving a problem 2 or 3 more problems would occur and some more responsibilities regarding my work are added to the mix, which made every single passing day count. As I'm typing these words, I've finally submitted my papers by email (after a little adventure in going to the new campus, my future workplace supposedly) and a recent phone call confirmed to me that my papers had been signed and ongoing in the process. I just hope the big part of this is over with just before my two-week leave ends. Bureaucracy is not in a friendly terms with my time.
For this reason, and because of all of that stress, I don't think I would be blogging on a regular basis, but surely I will try as much as I can, at least once every other week. Who knows, maybe by the next blog post here, I would be completely free…

Linearity…

Well, I'm typing this a little bit late so I hope I can finish this post in time to be posted. Thus, I think I will keep it short.
Been some busy week(s) lately. Last week I was busy preparing an Arabic blog post explaining a technique that I've been using lately to make some linear art out of some of my images, and I think I'll talk about it here. On the other hand, my mood swings been severe lately as well as periods of fatigue. And, of course, work is there which occupied my time for nothing else but frustration as well as exhaustion from driving to and from the workplace.
All that made me postpone creating this post and I was almost going to skip the post for this week actually but I changed my mind then and thought: Well, maybe I can make it short with few samples of what images I've been editing lately.

Editing

I'm still not active much with my camera (ahem, planning to), but on the other side, as usual, I've been editing old photos. Recently, also, I've been using a technique that I've developed myself and I've used it in one of the images uploaded to Mostphotos, but I didn't do much about it back then. Now, though, I'm exploring more about it. This is exactly the same technique which my Arabic post for the last week was about. Anyway, since my Arabic blog is dedicated to beginners, I had to do it in details (with illustrations) there. Here, I guess, it would be enough just to say that the whole technique involves stacking images and changing their blends to Difference and then nudging each layer few pixels in a specific direction. This would create some sort of a colorful line-art. Of course, more editing is required to enhance the image.

The Shining Kisser

The Shining Kisser (Line art)

I'm still experimenting with this technique actually, and apparently not any image can produce such a neat result; So, one has to be picky about what to convert into linear art like this. Along the way, I'm already planning to do a collection of such images and upload it to the stocks and see if they attract something. Apparently my bubbles series which I've uploaded months ago is not doing much lying there *pout*.

One of the images that didn't work out well I guess with this technique

Anyway, beside all this editing, I'm trying to use my phone from time to time though it is limited in choices and techniques but it has some cool features that I would struggle to achieve with a DSLR camera (e.g. long exposures with trails); Thanks to the AI in these phones (and my phone is considered old by now: Huawei Mate 9). Despite that, though, when it comes to shooting RAW images, things can be a bit awkward. 

Birds and Bird
Processed from phone RAW

Shooting RAW on Huawei Mate 9 disables the capability of zooming. I think that proves that in other modes in the camera where zooming is allowed, it is all done digitally. There are apps to edit RAW on phone of course but, as always, I usually prefer editing those on my PC with ACR and then Photoshop. The lens being about 4mm or so in focal length and not changeable of course would require me to crop a lot sometimes. Of course there are accessories for such phones to change the focal length but they are not in my mind right now. I'm still not giving up on my DSLR! Besides, it is better to be creative as much as possible with whatever is available at hand.
Aside from these difficulties, it seems also that the dynamic range for such sensors is still quite low; At least in my case as I worked with Birds and Bird (and few images in the past). When working with the phone's RAW files on ACR, the choice of colors seem to be limited somehow and not vivid enough despite working, as usual, in ProPhoto color space. Anyway, away with the RAW capabilities of the phone, it is a good catch for some crazy ideas to be done in a whim, like the other day when I thought of doing a selfie at work while rotating the phone, and picked the long exposure/water trail option for that task. All editing was done in-camera.

 

Finale

I'm typing this blog post mostly at work. Despite the "vacuum" in this place, yet it stresses me out. I'm waiting for some official documents to be issued from the Agency of Special Needs here to specify, officially, what is the level of my handicap (i.e. Retinitis Pigmentosa and sight level). It's been 2 weeks already now and no news is coming over. Which means I must be going to check with them again. I need this paper so bad right now to get started with my retirement process. Every second I spend in this place is like a ticking bomb. With my more-experienced colleague out of the place, the load now is pretty heavy on my shoulders and I can't bear with it further. Needless to say, moving to the new campus which is further away from home and in an area which I've never been to before at all (with bad planned roads as I heard) makes my feelings about it even worse. I lay it all in God's hands.

With that, I'm already racing my mind through and thinking about the future and what I could be doing after I get my "rest" from all of this. I think I would have no excuses to work further with my camera! I must! That brings also some thoughts for conlangs that I've forgotten about already. On a side note, I'm getting some reasonable positive feedback from some readers about my own writings and poems on Writing.com, which kind of sparkles some ideas; Some of which have been delayed since 2020 actually. 

It all sounds but like pink-tinted dreams and views of life for the time being, but surely I'll be able to breathe once I'm over with that place. Or so I hope, and pray…

Backies…

Hello! Here I am, posting again, after some break from blogging. Actually, this post is just a little announcement to tell that I'm still around and didn't forget completely about blogging, despite the lack of content really!

August had been such a busy month for me and still. To add more load to the mix, I'm officially back to work now (with all the rush-hour jams and those nasty stuff). However, I've been taking my first steps in recognizing my disability with Retinitis Pigmentosa; Meaning, I will be given the "special needs" (or "disabled" if you will) status in an official way and in return I'll be given some "small" advantages here and there (like a special permit to park my car in special needs/disability parking lot vacancy). However, the far-fetched goal is to get a "medical retirement" if possible.
The whole story is just still at its beginnings and I'm already having some problems or glitches in the system because of the paperwork and the messy job done by some in such governmental agencies. From my side, I've done all the required tests so far and I'm just waiting for the final decree in my case by some committees (and all that related jargon). I'm living in somewhat strange status, where I feel pressed and relieved at same time. I just hope these people don't make it harder for me to get that certificate and getting my retirement ASAP. Worrying is inevitable here and I just wish that I could blink and all is over with. 

Photo Work

Aside the paperwork that I've just mentioned, not much has been done photo-wise except for editing some old photos. However, I did indeed re-create some new panoramas from old ones as I was planning to be adding them to my Mostphotos exclusively, as large files to be downloaded and printed. As I'm typing this, I've already uploaded 2 more, and 3 more are waiting to be keyworded to be uploaded, but I'm having some hard time in creating keywords for these panoramas, and to focus in general. My brain feels fuzzy and blank. 

Failakan Sunset

Entry

In editing old photos, I've been revisiting old folders, as far back as 2011 (and even 2009) and been trying some new tricks on these old photos, specially those that were never touched because I deemed them useless (and this is one more reason to not delete bad photos). In the process, I've kind of "invented" some technique or style I would say for creating a linear art out of the photo. I'm also considering writing a blog post in Arabic for my Arabic blog about this technique specifically.
I liked the style of these images actually and I'm considering also doing a series of photos (or even taking new photos for this purpose) all to be in such linear art form and upload them to the stocks. Just an idea so far and if I would go ahead with it, I might consider mainly photos of fishes or plants. I think this technique is also suitable to create some of these "coloring book"-styled images.

The Shining Kisser (linear)
A sample of such art

Anyway, all of that is going on at the back of my head at the moment since I'm busy with other things specially with me going back to work right now. My mind is totally blank that I'm out of new ideas to shoot with my camera, and I didn't touch it in months right now. In order to get my fingers cracking with it, I've tried to shoot my 8-month old nephew in the house (it was also some practice for using the back-focus button, but seems this method is not in my favor for the time being).

Finale

So, this is a quick coming-back post. Without much fuss for the time being! I think I need to check previous posts to see where did I stop with photos, or maybe I'll start something completely new away from that series of posts.I'm not sure yet. Meanwhile, I need to prepare for that Arabic post for my Arabic blog, so I'm not sure I will be able to prepare a post for the week after the next. But I will try.
On the other hand, the weather here is miserable (i.e. normal) and I just can't wait for winter to be here, or at least fall (if such thing exists here). In the past few days I had to run errands, coming and going with my sister, under such sun, and such hell. Also most of the days in the past week were humid that it feels like drinking water just by going outside; And it's NOT a cold one.
As my brain is wandering off with ideas and images of what would happen next as I'm going through my plans for retirement, as well as Retinitis Pigmentosa itself, I'm trying hard to keep my feet firm into reality with this mundane day-to-day life. Other matters are also occupying my mind and take space, and it feels like my head will explode any moment now. But all in all, I'm trying my best to keep calm (and that makes me tired all the time really).
So, as for the camera work, I'm waiting for winter as I'm thinking of doing something at night like in the old days. These ideas were ignited when I started looking at some of my old panoramas from the seaside and I noticed how the stars did actually show clearly in the night sky in that panorama despite the high ISO and the noise, but they are there (and I will upload it soon to Mostphotos after keywording). This time, though, my plans involve using the modified camera to capture the seascape at night and not a full panorama. I wish though. We'll see about that when winter comes. For the time being, there are things that are just about enough to keep me worrying… and they are doing such a great job.

Ultra-Success…

Some good news for this week though short, as I was coping with sleeplessness and the wrecking sleeping pattern. I've been trying my best to do some chores that I've planned for myself, though I had to skip shooting the Monodrama event this year (and other members in the group had to cancel as well later on). Summer is coming, so I better plan some indoors activity for the time being.

Childhood Memories

Last week, on Tuesday specifically, a new exhibition was inaugurated for the work of Mohammed Sheikh Al-Faresi; An artist who used to present a TV show in 1980s about arts, and which I was quite fond of. Visiting this exhibition was important for me, even though I didn't pay much attention to artwork in other fields other than photography, as it was part of my childhood memories.

My favorite artwork in the exhibiition

His artwork is essentially based on Arabic calligraphy, entwined with other elements, majorly geometrical shapes. Some of these paintings did have 3D feel to it. I've found myself attracted to the black theme in general, and red comes next. Probably, typically, Arabic calligraphy is done with these 2 colors mostly.  However, in his artwork here, the calligraphy is a merge of random letters with no concrete words or sentence.

In my journey here, and allow me to call it a Journey Into My Childhood Memories,  I tried to document paintings that captured my attention the most, and in fact all the artwork here was appealing, but I was looking for something that was special to me. I also tried to capture some paintings from different angles in hope that I would combine them to make 3D images later on. I did also take a general video clip from the whole set of paintings in the exhibition.
My companion in this journey was the relatively-new Voigtländer 20mm lens, which has no auto-focus function. That was problematic a bit for my work specially when shooting video with my Canon EOS 7D. Never shot a video with a manual lens before, well not that long that is. However, the quality might be off a bit because of a slight out-of-focus render; I tried my best to focus on a single point manually and then walk as I take a video and keep my distance almost constant. Up till the moment of writing this passage, I'm still not finished with processing these shots, for reasons that I will explain below. My schedule was fully booked with tasks, meetings, naps, and testing.

A journey through the exhibition.

Ultra

After testing my Voigtländer 20mm f/3.5 lens for doing a simple panorama last week, it was time to do a "real" panorama processing. Even though I was deprived of sleep that day, but I decided to head out after work while the sun was still high up and planned in a haste to do a panorama using this lens, my converted camera, and my UV-pass filter. The first location that occurred to me was the coast line; a spot which I've done a nocturnal panorama before (and eventually later on, got published in a luxurious coffee table book).

UV Columnae

Namely, this would be my first ultraviolet panorama ever! Despite some problems, things went smoothly, but it gave me some idea about what to expect and what to watch for next time I work with ultraviolet filter. Being in a haste, you can see that the panorama was not perfectly centered. Yet, I'm still trying out some other projections and style; just trying to digging for time. Anyway, some notes about this process are:

1. The stitch was fair, despite the broken lines. Those broken lines or stitching errors, however, were not related to parallax-error, but rather to the fact that shadows were moving at that time of the day (the shooting process took some time), and some control points were not possible to generate between some slides. That caused broken and bent lines which were hard to adjust and would require more working time to fix properly.
2. Focusing: Voigtländer lens has no marker for infrared focusing, there typically no lens (as far as I know) has a marker for UV focusing. This is important since we are shooting at beams out of the visible range of the spectrum, in which lenses are usually made and calibrated. I used here the hyperfocus principle as if I was shooting regular light (at f/11) and the sharpness seems fair. However, I have to read more about focusing in UV photography.
3. As it was a test, I used Av mode to set the exposure automatically (while I fix the aperture). I worked without LiveView (because it would stop the metering mechanism), while setting my metering to Evaluative; I thought this would be the most proper for the situation we have here where light and shade are intermixed. However, that imposed great discrepancies in the exposure value between slides (and HDR technique is out of question). This suggests that next time a deliberate in-camera metering for various areas and averaging the exposure manually while using the manual mode is more like it, to avoid these averaging problems. 
4. In digital processing the RAW files before stitching, I've used the Infrared profile already installed in my ACR to adjust the white balance for these Ultraviolet shots (pointing to green foliage and copying the change to all slides). However, I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it or there is some concrete and systematic way to set the white balance. Again, have to read further!
5. This said, Voigtländer's usage for panorama making will be limited to this case; using UV filter. Yet, I need to test my Kodak gel filter with the converted camera to get a feel of how things would look like.

This said, I still need to test my converted camera in panoramas without even using any filter. Images taken that way would also cast some unexpected tints to the scene. Dropping HDR into the formula, and everything will be complicated. Yet, for the time being, I do not think of using HDR techniques when using filters on lenses. It's a dream to be delayed until time permits for slow motion again!

Finale

These were the two major event this week, and the rest was spent processing and trying to find time to sleep. There is a plan to go to Dubai by May with the group to attend a specific exhibition. Thus, I might not post much here until I get back home. Meanwhile, I'm busy organizing whatever I can with the group, and I'm thinking of doing some documentation to the situation there. I have to say that I'm pushing myself to do this, as my budget is under pressure in the current time.
I'm trying hard here to invest my weekend in working with my camera but seems I can't do this anymore. I have a strong urge to leave this house, but still unable to do so without proper means, and capabilities. The only thing that makes me calm down is playing games and playing music as loud as possible. Hard times are passing, and my self identity is at stake. Not sure how I'm going to snooze my worries or panic attacks, but it is apparent that I need some long rest. Yet, no vision for a possible vacation in the air this year…