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…

Strobogenic III…

Keeping myself busy here by typing some blog posts. I got some ideas for my Arabic blog which I didn't post into for quite a while. Suddenly, I'm filled with ideas and busy typing stuff for this blog and that blog, as well as doing some photos (or, trying to). All that with a heck of sleeping pattern. Anyway, the good thing is that I do have some stories to tell here, about experiments and shots that I've worked with a month or two ago before even the quarantine and home stay issues! These shots or experiments are actually a continuation for my experiments with the stroboscopic flash a while ago, when I did several selfies using this mode, as well as some "impressionistic" work with some roses, which I've posted about a while ago.

Fluffy

As I've just mentioned, this is a continuation for my work with the stroboscopic flash, and this time I've picked a very traditional item (for me) to work with: Feathers.
I kind of have a long history with feathers. I do like working with them in various situations: Macro, abstract, Still Life; And now, Motion.
This session was done on two parts actually. The first part was somewhat a failure because the speedlites were pointing directly to the set, where I kept a glass jar filled with water. Despite placing a paper to diffuse the light, but the distance between the speedlite and the paper was almost null and to have some good diffusion a space is needed between the material and the light source, so I had to shoot it again using a different method. In the second attempt, I did place some white boards to bounce the light from the speedlites and then onto the jar, but still the reflections were kind of harsh. Thus, the majority of the work here needed a heavy load of Photoshop work to enhance the reflections to some degree, beside the other adjustments of course.

The first setting before using white boards.
Just by luck, 4 feathers dropped down forming two Xs!
Hope this is not a bad omen!

In my previous attempts with stroboscopic shooting, I didn't get the chance to have a black background. This time, though, I do. And now I can say with utmost degree of assurance, that a black background for such shots is a MUST! This black background plays a grand role in enhancing the saturation of the colors and helps to show the movement much clearer. There might be some details in the black background but that's OK; These can fixed in Photoshop most of the time.

Red Chaos

Before I head to the bulk of my work here, I just need to talk a bit about Red Chaos because this image belongs to the first attempt, and not along the rest of my work in the second attempt. However, the image itself was not created until later in time, when I finished (mostly) working with all the shots that I've shot in the second attempt. After working with the second attempt, I did get this idea to examine the possibilities further with the images that I've taken in the first attempt; Because I didn't see any chance when I examined the images the first time, besides the hideous reflections on the glass. Red Chaos, however, is composed of various images overlapped together; A technique that I've been using a lot lately on various occasions and in old and new images. This technique is also one of the major tricks that I've used with the second attempt collection here (and these triggered me to think back at the failed attempt in the very beginning).

Raining Feathers

By the second attempt, I've decided to add more feathers of various colors instead of working with red feathers only as I've planned first (as apparent in Red Chaos). I have to say, Raining Feathers is one of my favorites despite the off-center alignment here as dropping the feathers was a random action and controlling the point of falling down cannot be set precisely. I realized, doing these experiments, that throwing off feathers is not an easy task at all! Also, the drier the hands, the better. The water at this level turned reddish because of the dye on one of the feathers that I've left from the previous attempt, but that was fine with me; The colorful, the merrier.

The Falling Red

Back with the red feathers, I did many drops and shots, all stroboscopic, and honestly, I didn't find much of the results amusing. In The Falling Red, I do like the movement of the feathers here, with movements like a dancer on stage, but the problem is that the tip of the trail at the bottom was not perfectly on the top of the jar, but behind it. I thought of fixing it but I decided not to lose much time on it and work on other shots. Probably Rest In Peace is the one with some acceptable result here, and it is worth noting that I've fixed the basic feather already on the jar (i.e. it didn't just land like that on its own).

Rest In Peace

At this level, I've shot a lot (and needless to say how much power I've used for the speedlites!), and I've realized that despite the movement, as recorded by the stroboscopic flashes, the shots were somewhat idle in some sense. Something was telling me that they needed some action; Some movement of some sort. I could have slowed down the shutter speed maybe to add some motion blur, but I've preferred something stable. So, it occurred to me to add some movement manually, without changing the shutter speed and see what happens. Sometimes, stroboscopic flashes do have an effect like the high-speed flashes in terms of freezing the motion. The final result was "creating" two images.

Eruption

Red Escape

The motion was easily recorded by dipping the tip of the feathers into the water in the jar and hitting them hard to make a splash, which was created successfully but without any presence for these feathers in the image in fact! So, it was time to be inventive as usual and compose images together. Adding to that, only one image for the splashing water was to my liking, while the rest didn't seem interesting much, so in the two images here, Eruption and Red Escape, the splashing water is essentially the same image put with these two, but got edited in different ways depending on the position of the feathers in the two images. In all of these images, and specifically in the second attempt of shooting these stroboscopic images with feathers after using a white board to bounce the light off, I had to edit the image and work on these white areas on the glass jar caused by the light reflections from the white board. I've tried to fix those in reality (i.e. by changing the shooting conditions) but that was almost impossible with the setting I'm using because diffusing light do require some space, and even though I'm bouncing the light off white boards, the boards themselves are not distant from the speedlites to give the chance to the light to spread. Actually all this work with the second attempt images made me realize that I could maybe do something about the images in the first attempt, and this is how Red Chaos (above) was created.

Methodology:
In my final work with the camera and speedlites, I've noticed the tendency within myself to take it easy and to just try and compose things by editing in Photoshop and such, like the previous shots for example; Eruption and Red Escape, as well as more that will come in future posts, hopefully.
This really made me think: Was I too hard on myself trying to do everything in-camera and with little processing? Or was I on the right track and I'm going astray right now? I don't really know the exact answer and probably there is no right or wrong here, but what I think of myself is that I was highly affected by the nature of my photographic life in the past few years, specifically when I was a member in a photography group, when there was much focus on doing "authentic" work with little editing because, naturally, these are the regulations usually for photography contests. However, when I see other people online do their photographic work, specially when it comes to commercial and product photography, those artists don't see any shame in editing their work to represent what they are working on. Many photographers out there do edit their work in composites to create some surreal images and deliver that WOW effect to the viewers. It is editing, but an estimated and carefully planned one, and not just a random one. Not everything can be fixed in Photoshop.

Now, to be specific about the stroboscopic photography, I've started to make sense of it all indeed. On many websites that I've encountered online, it might be stated that such type of photography is subject to trial and error. This is true to some extent but not completely as there is a window of calculated guess at work here, starting from the formula providede in the speedlite's manual:

Frequency = Number of flashes ÷ Shutter Speed;

(f = N/t)

From this formula, I can start, indeed, planning for the shot just as I plan for a regular shot based on the aperture I want to pick for the scene. The starting point here though would be either the number of flashes I need, or the shutter speed (or time). Mostly it would be the latter depending on the situation, and probably it is the most flexible factor here.
As for the number of flashes, I usually fluctuate between 5 and 10, and this is the simply the number of replications you want to see of your subject in the image. Condensing an image with so many replications of any object as it moves is not a good idea on most occasions actually and find a number between 5 and 10 is quite suitable for most situations.
Now, depending on these 2 factors, the shutter speed and the number of flashes (replications) required, the frequency is yielded using the formula above; But lo and behold! Sometimes the frequency exceeds the limit (199Hz for Canon's speedlites) or even simply that the batteries or speedlites power is not enough to support the operation, and here raises up the important of having a dark room or place to work; Because with this, you have the flexibility to increase your shutter speed as you like, and since the shutter speed is in reciprocal relation to the frequency, that means the more shutter speed you add (slow down, increase time of exposure), the lower the frequency would be - this said in case of fixing the number of flashes or replications.
And believe it or not, the frequency of the stroboscope is better be down and not high! This is because, the higher the frequency you use, the closer the beats of the flashes would be and the closer the replications of the moving object would be. If you care about showing details in your work for that moving object, then it would be wise to add some distance between replicas of the moving object in the scene or photo. By definition, the frequency is the number of beats per second (that's why we divide N by t), so the higher the frequency, the beats per second are going to be more, meaning more replicas in such a short period of time which essentially reduces the distance between these replicas in the image. To summarize all of that:

Number of flashes (N): Number of replications

Shutter Speed (t): The total time of the exposure

Frequency (f): The distance between replicas

Of course, all of this talk does not include the power of the speedlite(s). The more speedlites, the better, of course. Sometimes, one might find oneself forced to change the whole stroboscopic settings to meet the power requirements, specially if the speedlite(s) is/are running on batteries alone without any external assistance.
So, these are my thoughts about how to build up the initial settings and idea for working with the stroboscopic flash. Adding to that the very first remark I've mentioned above, that one must also think and include composing a number of images altogether if required and if it is not critical (e.g. for photo contests which usually require authentic work rather than composite photos). I hope the information here is useful for dear reader.

Finale

Well, at the end, I think I will be preparing these images here to be uploaded to the stocks since I didn't upload any images for a long time. There is a number of images too related to chess, which I might post about here later. I worked with chess for a long time and I think I will put it all aside for the time being and start something else.
In times like these I'm really not sure how I feel. I do feel relaxed at one point for staying home, but in the same feel upset because I cannot move around as I like as well (specifically for shopping and getting snacks and some necessities). But beside all these mundane everyday matters, I'm trying to focus on the bigger picture and what about to be coming next. Great uncertainty lie here and I can't figure out any heads or tails out of it. This even had me re-think, again and again, about my career possibilities beyond my current job. Is there anything I can do during this time to have some cash on the side? Moonlighting? Preparing myself to leave my stable job? This said, I have to say that things are fine so far with my work since I've already had my salary for March without going to work, but would that continue? I don't know, like I don't know many other things about the situation here. I'm supposed to go back to work by April 26^th, but even that date, might be pushed forward further if things didn't calm down.
Many things, and ideas, are chasing through my mind and I really need to work with my camera further to help me calm my brain down. Also, I do have some plans to play some games. I'm enjoying this home-stay thing because this is what I do already before all this had started, but some annoyances are inevitable. Oh how I wish to have a walk in some lavish garden right now, and rest in a shady gazebo…