Crazy Me, Crazy World...

Finally I can say we got winter. The weather is getting chilly a bit in the morning, and sort of nice at noons. I want to spend more time in the outside but then, with my life pace and the tiresome body and mood, I don't think I can do that in the current time.
I'm struggling to get back to my writing habit, writing and joining some words from here and there and calling these stuff a poem or lyrics. The latest was done yesterday and called it Alien. It is about my feelings in the current time. Just lost in space and time nd I don't know where or what I'm doing really. All I know is, I need to be alone. I'm using now a tool that helps on pushing my thoughts about the words a bit, or brainstorming if I should say. The website generates a random word and asks you to provide some words related to that random word then you should make sentences linking the idea of these keywords to the main idea you want to write about! It is so random that I like it really. Some people say that Alien is nice, but I'm not yet sure it is that good. The website can be found here, Creativity Tools (check the left panel). I think it is mainly for story writing but it serves everyone right I guess.

I've started to work a bit on a new facade for my webpage and I've made a general graphic representation then divided that into several parts using Photoshop and saved it as HTML. somehow piece of cake but yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg. A load is coming and I need some time to do the rest. For the time being, all I need to do is stick links to these cut out pieces, and the race with time begins on finishing various stuff. The dictionary that I've made for Ayvarith will be one big headache. My mind is already shattered and scattered that I've forgot that I'm supposed to go on a field work this morning and must, again MUST, go tomorrow, Thursday.

Camera-wise now. I've managed to take some pictures of myself in order to work around with them, even though I'm not quite satisfied with them. I need to study the light more AND I would need more tools to control the light. A desktop lamp will not do any good and a flash source is not always adequate in such situations. I've started morphing the image already in Photoshop but stopped now for some time doing some other things. The process of morphing my face to apply the idea I have in my mind is quite challenging for me, because I've never done such a thing before. I was looking forward to see if there is a plugin that can spare me some of the tiresome tasks I need to do, but no luck. I guess I need to do all by myself.

On the other hand I'm looking forward to order some stuff for my camera, and most importantly, a macro lens. The options are wide open, but to keep it under a certain budget, I've decided to go for something else other than Canon. Also, and because I don't seem to need a macro lens very often like I do with a fisheye lens in snapping architectural features and panoramas, I've decided to take one with a range of focal length and not a fixed one. The thing about this feature is that a lens with fixed focal length usually gives a sharper image. Besides, a lens with adjustable focal length tend to have some "creeps," that is when the sliders tend to be easy to move with a slight shake or movement. The main aim now is for a Tamron, or Sigma lenses.

Some of the options.

Along with these lenses I'm thinking of getting a new backpack to hold my camera stuff and lenses. As with a new lens to the group, my current case will be stuffed, ridiculously. Then there is the matter of the moving ball head for my monopod, and who knows, maybe a whole new tripod even? I'm not sure yet. Expenses. I'm trying to hold my horses back a bit and forget about my credit card. It already has unpaid amounts hanging on.

I've finished my fourth album recently for pictures from Ireland, 2010. For the time being, I'm taking a kind of a break. I don't upload images to Mostphotos.com that often right now. I used to upload around 3 images a day, in average, last month. My rank stepped back a little now because of my laziness, but until the end of the month I will be in the front page as the photographer of the month. I'm working somehow on uploading one image a day and give more space for comments and "likes" in the website, because too many images at one time might cause some chaos and people might not know even that there are new stuff in your profile.

One of the images though, that people seem to like it a lot, was one image I called "In Terra Gigantum," or "in the lands of giants"...

In Terra Gigantum

This image was taken with a mini-tripod that I think it is supposed to be used for webcams (since I got it from a computer store from here before going to Ireland). I went wild with it for some reason, I think that was my mood with the saturation of the image. I didn't like it much. It was too much reddish and I don't remember I was that cheerful that day. The best thing I could find in my mind was to make a vivid image with weird settings (typical for HDRs). This image at this angle really revives my hopes of a panorama on a low level to the ground. The technical problems are there but hey, here comes innovation. I think I should think of something but before this, I need a location. Imagine looking at a scene from the perspective of a smurf! Voila! I would some sort of high support to fix my VR-head on the top of this small tiny tripod on the ground. The tripod already flips over when I attach it to my camera and lens, be it my Canon 7D (heavier) or Canon350D (older and lighter somehow). Now imagine putting the weight of something around 2kg (around 4.4lb) on the top of that WITH a camera. The only good point about it is, once fixed the balance, you just need to rotate the head of the VR-head itself and not the tripod. I need to think about it and try it technically to decide what to do about it and how to balance.

Again, gone wild. With Mostphotos you really got the chance to show the world how crazy you are. This time, with a simple golden clock antique that was in the lounge of Thornbrook House. Most of the crazy part here was done in Photoshop after the tone-mapping, with many adjustment layers...

Lord Time.

Maybe you can call it an emphatic image about the importance of time, as for me, all I wanted to do is pronounce this clock and show its details. Along with my work I've found myself radiating the blue part and so it was. The main reason to do all of that was the position of the clock with that wall at the back. I was not free to remove all the distracting elements. It was hard to do so. Hence, the only solution that came about in my head was to simply, attract the eye by colors and their contrast as if the subject was hit by a spot light.

Now away from my crazy mind, there are moments that are crazy by themselves, e.g. my life. Last week and in a day like this, I was out in some sort of a secret mission if I should say (yeah and I'm talking about it here) with a group from the military. We were supposed to go to Boubyan island again, but then suddenly and when we were there, the plans changed. They decided to go to some where in the middle of Kuwait. Some area that was a junk yard for destroyed military vehicles and weapons. We checked 3 locations generally and in the first, I was surprised for that tank, that after we finished the general check-up work there, I snapped several images for it and made then back home several versions from HDR slides.

A series I called "Bellum et Pax" (War and Peace).

The junk yard is always a good spot for HDR images, with all the red and yellow hues of the corroded metals. The funny thing here is that the gun of the tank is missing as you can see from the images. Been told by the soldiers with us that some Asian workers come here put a tent over the junk and by night they come back to work and weld off the parts they need away from the eyes of patrols. I really don't know what they would do with it, but it sucks!

Our next stop was in an open area where some containers used to be collected, but nothing was interesting for my camera there (despite maybe the barbed wire that I wanted to snap but didn't find it attractive enough for my eyes). The third stop was the one that really made me hate such field trips once and for all and wish I wouldn't go there anymore. We drove into a field of junk ammo that didn't explode, with my own eyes I saw a huge bomb, obviously it's not a tank's or a normal gun. It got to be an airplane's. We stopped thinking about the matter (or I should say they were thinking and I'm stuck in the car) but then they decided to retreat backward and went around that junk, but yet, we were still surrounded by ammo, maybe lesser in amount than the location before. One of soldiers told us that this area was a mine field before as well (and who knows if it was cleaned in a proper manner or not!). We had to walk in a straight line following some traces of car tires on the ground to make sure that the land where we step is safe. At the end of our work, I picked the camera and snapped only one scene for the horizon, where the clouds where gathering in what was somehow a sunny day...

Forgotten Grace.

I called it "Forgotten Grace" because, maybe, for some time, we really don't know how lucky we are that we are alive still. After these moments in a mine field amid the ammo that can explode at any minute, who knows what or when or why your life might be taken. It is just a flick of an eye sight, and you're not here anymore. Praise it, as long as you can...

The image here was bracketed (i.e. for HDR) but I merely used the technique to show the details of the clouds and pronounce the more. Nothing crazy about this as the feelings and the situation, were not adequate for such a crazy mood.

Life goes on... but till when?

Happy New Year. Really?

Happy new year. So they say. Anyway, not much difference to me, for all days seem to go on one direction in a monotonous rhythm.I didn't even touch my camera for a month or more, well, except for trials to take a picture of myself to work on my idea for Asperger's but even that was a fail. I need a hand at this, but all I have is myself to work here.
I've began to really hate the start of the week for all the bad news that might come to my ears, just like the situation with my dear friend, who gets all the heavy dose of bad news in the first day, in the early hours of the morning as he steps into his work place.
I try to amuse myself now and then in my idleness by working on some of my photos from this year and the last year, and of course most if not all of them are from Ireland, as I didn't capture many photos from here. I did however catch few that are somehow worth the mention, mainly two, from Boubyan island 2 weeks ago, which brings me to the point here that I'm supposed to go to Boubyan tomorrow, Wednesday. The news makes me sick somehow in that it is, again, with the military. The view is nice really, but I'd rather work in a different environment. Moreover, we are limited by time in that we have to get back to my work place for the damn fingerprint scanning.

Boubyan incipit, Boubyan fines.

A road on the island.

As mentioned before, I've started to use Latin to name my images, thinking it gives some sense of power or mysterious hue (but Irish Gaelic can be included sometimes of course). The name here means "Boubyan begins, Boubyan ends," denoting the fact that this island is simply, clear. The long road won't make much difference in the views. Well, maybe in the middle of the island it is different, who knows! Tomorrow we are supposed to go deeper into the island. I will try to bring my camera and see what I can snap. On the right side you can see the bridge that leads into and from the island. I took a small panorama of that bridge from the same position but I didn't look after it. I don't think the angle was good.

Post-war Traffic

This truck maybe was the best catch in that trip. The rusty metal is always a good subject for HDR composition, with its destinctive reddish hue. The soldiers gathered around their officer and discussed the matter of the bullet hole in the front glass or the windshield. Some say it is the one that killed the driver while others say it is an after-math process. What an intellectual dicussion! I tried to catch the scene again with a fisheye lens but in fact, didn't make much a difference. I think I should have stepped a bit further away from the truck to allow more space for the land on the right, and to give a clearer view of the fisheye effect.

Beside those, there were many pictures processed from Ireland, old and new. I've finished my third album and going on completing my fourth album. If there is anything worthy living for right now, in my life, is the pictures I make. I'm trying hard to put my feelings into them, but I do give some space to technical matters as well sometimes. On the technical side, I'm fluctuating between sRGB and Adobe spaces, but I do become naughty sometimes and feel like I want to work in ProPhoto even though I know it won't fit my needs perfectly. It is just the need for vivid colors that makes me eager to work with this color space.

I'm tending now to use more and more adjustment layers (after tone-mapping the HDR slide of course). All to give the vivid or the mysterious look. Not everyting can be done in the tone-mapping process but at least, controlling the light and the sharpness of some zones in the image. Not much panoramas now since I worked out most of them in the early trials as I arrived back from Ireland, but nonetheless, there was one or two and some of the small ones that I needed to do. One of those was the panorama taken from the front yard of Hore Abbey, which in fact, generally in shape, didn't differ much from the previous done panorama from the inside of the abbey:

Hore Abbey in the front yard.

Hore Abbey from the inner court.

I think the two differ only in the amount of details of the structures, of course. In order to make the new panorama a sort of a magical place (and I called it already Horeus Magicalis), I used many adjustment layers to control the color of the skies and the grass (which was green of course). I preferred the yellow here because normally it adds a good contrast against a bluish sky. One of the major tools that are in use in my work is the Selective Color adjustment layer (of course beside the normal and everyday tools, like Curves and Levels). This adjustment layer allows me to blend-in different colors into some other color in varying degrees, and that affects the appearance and the mood of the image a "lot". Having the mood I want for an image is a serious, hideous and tedious work when it comes to sRGB space. Thus, as a norm, I tend to use Adobe 1998 color space the most. Ghosts and artifcts forming in HDR slides is another problem, along with the chromatic aberrations which Photomatix doesn't seem to fix them properly, hence I need to use Hue/Saturation adjustment layers often to eliminate the magenta lines from the edges (and sometimes cyan as well).

One of the small panoramas (vertical this time) that I've done recently was the chestnut tree taken from Cahir town, along the long path beside the river bank leading to the Swiss Cottage.

Castán (Chestnut)

This little vertical panorama is weird a bit because the upper part of the tree is in fact dangling over the path, i.e. it was above my head when I took the shots for this tree (handheld). Here it appears likeif the tree is springing outward like a flower and not really bending over my head! Just the effect I want! The problem here though was, as usual, fixing the colors AFTER tone-mapping. If I remember correctly, the space here was sRGB and it was so hard to convince myself with the saturation in general, but here you go. I was aiming really at elaborating more of the trunk's color and make it more reddish like. Nowto include the whole tree is another story. I would have to take a wider and higher panorama, which in fact would be probably better be done in a 360 panorama. The situation there is complicated!

Now in the mess, I'm starting to work just a little bit on my web page. Just a little and not much. The previous design I've made before was not really to my likings, so I decided to work on another one. This time I will try make the whole ting in GIF (with transparent background) and then cut it out into slides and convert the whole thing into HTML. Hope, that won't take much of the connection speed needed, and the design is simple I believe. I finished reading my book about manuscripts, and hence I have some time at work to do something about my webpage. All I need right now is just a push and a flare in my brain. I tend to sit idle in this place not able to do anything because of the bad mood.

I need some push with my poetry. I didn't write anything in a long time. I just hate it when this happens. I got the damn feelings, but I don't have the damn connection to put them together. What's happening!!!

Can It Get Any Worse?

There are some times in life that you would really wonder: what else could go wrong? or you might ask yourself: could it be worse than this?
Some harsh two weeks been passing over my life in all aspects that made me almost paralyzed. The only joy I can do for the time being is just to sit here in front of my PC at home and work on my usual pictures. The past week I was so tired from every single thing in my life, so much that for everyday and after coming from work I didn't even have the appetite to have lunch or anything. I was surviving on some coffee and some biscuits and sometimes, some cereals. My appetite somehow increased a bit in weekends but with some irregularity, ordering from outside most of the time.

To complete the course of the curse, today I woke up late, struck with the fact that my work place has no internet as well (while other places around has it), and with some "nice" news that I will have to move in a chopper with my director along with some people from the ministry of defense in order to demonstrate about some aspects of our field work. The flight is supposed to be to Warbah island, on the borders with Iraq, but later they called and canceled the idea, so we are going to Bubyan (Boubyan) island (largest Kuwaiti island) and by car. The fact that really makes me nervous is that I have to work with the military; a place and a rank of people that I always hated. Well... alongside with cops. After all, I'd rather not to talk about the matters of the heart; they are complicated, yet never to the satisfaction.

So, here I am again with my photos. If you like to see them just scroll down maybe without reading my boring explanations or, if you don't like any of it, then why the heck you are here anyway? Ah, I see. To feel good about yourself having a better life than mine? Yeah, probably true.
In the meantime there is one idea that is still pending in my head and I'm thinking of how to achieve the desired effect to it. This time I'm going to need some heavy work in Photoshop. It is not correcting a photo this time but, instead, manipulating a photo in some heavy way. Been surfing the net for some tutorials and I got some tips, but I don't deem them useful so much for the idea I'm thinking of right now. I have to my out with my own hands to know how things are going to work out. The main problem now is that I'm going to need to take photos of myself by myself; the usual panic.
The idea I'm seeking to implement here has a connection to the Asperger's syndrome. For some time and when I thought I have such a thing because of some attitude and some behavioral. Still though, even after an online friend (who's in the know) confirmed to me that I do not have such a syndrome, the experience of seeking an answer to some of my problems in focusing and other things that kept being after me since high school is on the go. However, this experience made me think about something to express how much this is tolerating for the mind and the psychology of the person indeed. You might spend years trying to figure out why you do things the way you do and why you feel the way you do and what makes you do certain things in a specific manner not like others...etc. All of that, specially when it does not coincide with other people's typical looks on things, can make you feel estranged at times, simply feeling no one does understand the way you feel, but you and only you.

Been working most of the time with my pictures from Ireland. Sometimes I would go back to those taken in 2009, from Galway and Mayo, and then back again to the newest ones taken in 2010. The work panoramas is light relatively, for the time being and after finishing to some extent the dining room, which was so hard to do because of the many problems related to the noise level and to the great difference in exposures in between the slides (specially around the main window in the room).

The Dining Room in LP.

The reason I've made this in LP (little planet) projection only is that, the stitching errors are lesser that way and somehow less obvious if they exist somewhere. I can't really recognize where did I go wrong with the panoramas of the Dining Room and the Lounge before, but my suspects in the case are the not-so-good settings in the camera and/or the shaky position of my camera on the VR-head. Like the lounge before, this panorama was first tone-mapped from HDR, then stitched. Typically, the tone-mapped stitching proved to have lesser stitching errors than the HDR stitching.

I've finished the second album already for pictures from Co. Tipperary and working on the third one, and it is almost over with. Probably would send it over with Christmas coming? Maybe. You can see the second album (if you care) by clicking the link below:

Second Album

I've been trying to make more vivid images with my HDRs as I noticed people really them on MostPhotos.com, unlike other stock sites that think about marketing only. This really encouraged me to get out of the circle of the typical normal images just to please these stock sites (and big times, my images been refused for over filtering or something like that). The result of this enthusiasm is that I've been named as photographer of the month in Mostphotos.com, for being the most active member in the last 30 days! 

I keep my work now in sRGB and Adobe 1998 regions, but never trespass to ProPhoto again. I think the two former spaces make it enough to produce some vivid colors in the photos. Yet, the important thing here is to think of what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing. 

Rare Auld Times

Yes, it is "auld" not "old". It's a famous Irish folk song. However, in this image here and in order to resemble and give an impression of antiquity, the drama of history, and also a sense of the saying "old is gold," I made the image look harsh and somehow like dirty, for a purpose. It is to give a tense look to the eyes in order to deliver a message of how old is this thing, and in the same time I have to keep it unique and smooth without much turbulence in the colors which causes the eye to get tired a bit, hence I added hue layers to turn it into more of a golden object (rather than the simple yellow and the reddish hue in the original after the effects were done). This effect also helped on getting out the patterns and the scratches in the face of the clock itself, which otherwise, would be hard to see in a normal image. Unfortunately, some people commented on this image in technical terms neglecting completely the message I want to deliver.

Another example of patterns that I wanted to extract was an example of a door. The door is for Cahir church and here, I wanted to show the pattern of the wood itself and hence I had to apply what I call the "dramatic effect" just like in the clock face above.

Cahir Church Door

The process for the image above was not all done by HDR and that's it. In fact, lot of effects and enhancements took place AFTER tone-mapping the HDR. My Photomatix didn't give exactly what I was seeking so I had to get to some point close to what I aim at, and then work on sharpening some parts while smoothing the others and then lighten some parts and darken the others and so on. The noise level here and because of the "harsh" tone-mapping, yielded a great deal of noise that was hard to remove without losing details in the most important part of the image, the door. I had to use layer masks, lot of them, to control my work area.

My work during the last week also included some fantasy, some dreams that kept on visiting me from my childhood days; the heroes, the swords, the dragons ...etc. There had been some images that I don't know why I did it that way, but some people did really like it that way! I'm more inclined now to use some Latin names to my images. I think it gives some power.

Somewhere, in My Dreams...

Lignum Vitae (tree of life)

The second image here, the tree, was actually modified in HDR mode before tone-mapping. I've added some blur to the image and made it go toward the tree. I just felt that it needs some life and action and probably, I would better do that before tone-mapping to make the light coherent more.

That's it for me with photography so far, and there had been some photos that I've been doing all over again with some change in the settings, specially images taken in 2009 from Ireland. Right now, I'm trying to organize my life a bit despite the shaky situation at work and home. Thinking about the Ayvarith page that I've promised myself to work with makes me stressed like hell like I'm really not up to it. Zillions of things pass on my mind and wait on the queue to be done but I just don't know what or when to do so. Two things I might have to get on with very soon is the matter of the new car that I need to buy, and also before that, my Asperger's project. As for the time being, I guess I won't be having my emotional part of life for now, and probably for some long time from now on...