I will fly to Ireland on the beginning of next Tuesday, 29th of September. I'm so nervous since it is my first travel to be done alone. I'm planning to have my kit with me (tripod and camera) and that makes me a bit nervous about the security procedures... it is like a curse now to be an Arab and going any where else other than the Middle East, I believe. I'm so lazy doing my suit case as I don't really know what to take exactly, but for sure I'm going to take mostly heavy clothes, as I was told the weather will be cold there (I think they don't have a fall season there but winter directly after summer!). The suit case is lying there on my lazyboy open and waiting to be finalized. I got my laptop ready in my backpack... need to do things here and there. My sleeping habit now is a curse... I just don't have a fixed number of hours to sleep or to wake up... and I get frequent headaches on my right side just above the eye.
Despite all of this mess, I felt some urge to go around and do some experiments with my camera here and there. The most annoying thing is that, I figured out you almost have no where to take photos for in Kuwait. Wherever you go, you're going to face a cop or some security guys asking you for some permission to take photos. I was almost going to have a fight with two security guys when they asked me for permission just to take a photo of some corridor near Sharg mall. I managed however to snap other photos before this happens in some nitch that overlooked the marina in Sharg mall:
The image is actually composed of several shots and stitched together to form a panoramic view (small one though). The time was noon (around 2 p.m.) and the sun was almost striking in my direction but since I shot in RAW format I was able to change the WhiteBalance later on (and it was a tideous work) and combine the image and the panoramic view later on again (each angle contains 3 shots for HDR composition later), thus I tried to make the image cooler a bit:
After shooting this view, I went shooting single shots (but 3 exposures each) and changing several focusing modes, but seriously, I don't find much difference in any of them. After all of that I just had to work on one and changed its WB to form a vivid image:
And just for fun, and alone in my room, I worked on some of the old RAW files that I took some time ago for the cats in the house, and of course it was not an HDR or anything, but for fun purposes, it was a good time-killer:
I planned then to do a little experiment. I fixed the tripod on the small ladder in my room and went on capturing several images at several angles for my room in an upper level. It was worthy, and I decided then to do a 360 panorama of my room. But it was hard to do the 360 panorama with my old camera. I think you'd need a special camera or at least a wide-angle lens to take photos with and stitch later on to get more stable images and then covert them into a 3D environment just like in www.photojpl.com. However, the results were not so bad after all:
... And also my full room view:
For the time being, I just packed the camera and the tripod and I'm trying to hold my horses a bit and get prepared to travel. For the time being I'm coping with some stupidity on AIM networks, which some times helps me indeed to laugh a bit. A piece of advice: do not give a farmer, a PC. I've been awake for more than 12 hours now as I'm typing this, and I wish if I can remain awake to go and buy a CF-memory card, but I guess my eyes cannot bear much for the time being. I wish if I can make it!
This could be my last entry before going to Ireland, and I don't know if I will be posting any comments here when I'm there.
