Mentis Abstractivus...

Partially busy week. And I mean busy by sense of being busy at work itself. I'm conducting an experiment with my director (boss) in the field of gamma rays detection. Despite the simplicity of the experiment, but it takes so much time (around one hour and a half in good conditions). The first phase, for now, is supposed to take around 9 days, and I've done 5 already so far. Beside other things to do, I barely have some time to keep on reading. However, I'm almost finished with these books.

Fasting for more than two weeks now leaves my time restricted. I can't resist the afternoon's nap until the time to break the fast, and doing some work-out in hope to increase the vitality of my body, all of that leaves no time for some of my projects. Yes, my Ayvarith recording is still on hold as I don't know what are the problems I'm facing. I think I do have some mic-phobia too!
In a desperate move, however, I've been taking my camera with me to work for some days, and also tried to do some work with my sound trigger (that I've tried only once). Found myself, or should I say my brain, works more into the shapes. I really don't know if this is the effect of reading after George Barr or simply it is what you can find in modern architecture, but simply this is the catch of my eyes. I have to say I'm sort of glad for some of the catch.
One of those catches, again, got affective if I can say simply by cropping some portions of it. I said before that one of the illusions to make is to crop some areas that send the message of spatial recognition to the mind

Geometrical Play I

Geometrical Play II

Yes. The two images are similar with one little difference; one of them is turned upside down. Maybe you could tell right away which is which, but I can't judge myself because I'm the photographer and I already know which is which and it is imprinted in my mind now. However, one or two people did already miss it up and guessed wrong! I feel happy for the confusion here!

Geometrical Play (original scene)

As you can see here, I've just cropped the ground. I think that point is what translates the image to the viewer and missing it up would confuse the viewer. Anyway, this is my aim in the beginning! Creating some illusion, but I'm not sure how affective it is as I said before, because I'm the photographer here. My only testimonial is taken from two viewers only. To add a bit to the confusion, I've numbered the turned upside version with "I" and the correct one as "II". Minds sometimes adhere to the order of mathematics and take for granted that "I" must be the original, I guess?

On the other hand as well, one of the abstracts that caught my eyes is the shadows play; specifically by noon time. The beauty of such shadows is simply, lines. Maybe there are no curves, but there are lines in a zigzag shape. I have to say though, it was not so easy to catch these lines from a proper angle, adding to that, without a tripod.

Linear Shadows

The shadows here are taken with low angle (I had to go downstairs some steps and lower my back). After all, there is some cropping of course and a tilt. The tilt is aimed at making 2 horizontal lines in the middle of the image. Well, maybe I needed to do some skewing here. The image above is prepared from a single RAW. One of the things that I've had hard time with, is the White Balance (WB). This is not the first time anyway. Shooting in the sun is always problematic even if the camera is not directed to the sun's direction, as the WB can make the decision hard to make. I feel the image being dull because of the tiling's color, and making them blue (cold temperature) would interfere a bit with the shadows, so I decided to leave it at that point.
On another occasion though, I thought working with HDR would help me on making a better decision, but I was wrong, again. The problem gets even more complicated when tone-mapping the HDR and adjusting the color temperature from there.

Shadow Tilings (HDR)

Not only the WB was hard to make out here, but cropping was so as well, and the borders of the tilings were more pronounced in this angle. The cropping was a must here and not optional, as the space was narrow, and using a fisheye lens (or even my 18-55mm) would include portions of the stairs and the building. The zigzag lines also, somehow, corrupted the symmetry that I was working for. Maybe it is something to re-visit at another time.

My journey was still going on with my work place. Sometimes you just have to look and "think" instead of just looking. I work in this place 5 days a week, for more than 5 years now, and guess what? There are features that I've just "thought" about and decided to check what I can do with.

Looping Loop

The structure above is hung or welded above the ground, between the pillars and the wall (you could see the edges in the previous images). Merged with HDR, tried to add drama with colors by putting down the saturation for the highlights and putting up the saturation for the shadows (which are settled mainly in Reds). Pushing the Black level a bit to help with it but I think I didn't like it much. Crops existed here too and some perspective corrections as well. If it was in my ability to shoot this again, I would zoom in more and go up to its level and shoot, but I don't have this capability right now, as the structure is around 3 meters above the ground. Anyway, I do prefer the black and white version (and some people already liked it that way).

Looping Loop (BW)

Moving now to my second trial with my sound trigger. I have to say it wasn't successful as I wanted. The main failure here is that I couldn't make the flash shoot for one time only. Adjusting the sensitivity of the sound trigger didn't help either. The experiment was done with playing cards deck, but after all I got some shots that I did submit to some stock sites already.

To Gamble

No. I don't gamble. It's just a title here! The movement blur you see is caused by the several flash shots as the sound of the cards when they are shuffled keeps on triggering the circuit, and in a shutter speed of 15 seconds, lot of pictures taken in this trial were blown out. It was indeed a gamble in the dark, and guess I've lost it. I have to think of some way to limit the number of fires from the flash. There is, however, another idea for this sound trigger that still in the process of cooking yet in my mind.

Last night was a sleepless night. Literally. I really don't know how I'm typing this right now (Thursday) as I didn't sleep a bit all night and came to work (and worked in the lab for hours and then coming here to post something!). Anyway, despite the frustration, there was hope. A hope in an image I've totally forgot about (again!).

Visitors

The weird combination of factors in this image makes it special to me and to my surprise, just when I pulled down the Exposure slider in the RAW editor, all the details of the sky and the clouds started to appear and the scene turned silhouette. The sun was rising and the sky was blue, but yet, it looks more like a black and white. Not completely, but what I mean is, the saturation is low in the sky. The high ISO level of 12800 made me desperate about this image in the beginning. In the beginning means like, when I took it in the first time back in October 2010. With lowering the Exposure (and increasing the Recovery factor in the RAW editor) seems that the noise level (specially the chromatic noise) got reduced significantly. That does not mean completely vanish, not even by cleaning plugins like NeatImage, for example, but the good news here, it is a silhouette. You have no details in the subject's shape to worry about! so, you can go a bit of extreme with your cleaning tools!
The image reflects my mood indeed, without me planning it. All what I was doing back then was chasing some ravens or crows in the sky. Suddenly it touches your mood once you play with it for the sake of playing with it! This teaches me to always visit what I was desperate of before. Who knows what you can get out of these images that you might think they are useless snapshots. But the main factor here is, what's your mood is about?
Some friends commented already on it saying it looks like something from Hitchcock shows, and later reflecting on it, it does remind me of The Lost Crown and Jonathan Boakes! I think I will print this one and see how it is. I'm sure some websites did reject it already for the noise level still. Oh well...

It's weekend. Finally. Guess what? My friend is inviting me for dinner for some occasion he had. Well, the bad news is... I wish I didn't eat the whole week!!!

Alexander 6, V26.

After working on typing the whole thing yesterday, now, and thanks for the auto-save option in Blogger, I've lost everything by a wrong keystroke that deleted my whole post. All of that was to set on an Amazon Associates account. My aim is not to get money via Amazon really, as I barely find people to read this blog anyway, but it would be helpful to have the search bar on the right and just put the image directly into the blog editor instead of opening a new window for this task. Well, I can use images of lens as well!
Here I go writing up what was deleted, or some of it as much as I can remember.

I brought the camera to my work place yesterday as I wanted to take some pictures of a device, to put it up with the text I'm writing for a friend about radiation measuring devices and such, but by almost the end of the day and before 30 minutes of going out from the work place, I felt the urge to snap some images for the building I work in, again. But this time, I was to use the 15mm Fisheye lens, and it proved very helpful, or should I say extremely helpful!

The old panorama that I made for this building was, well, awkward if I should say in many aspect, but yet lot of people liked it and it was given to the German Ambassador as a gift! Yet, I've found out some stitching mistakes that I didn't notice before at all in that old panorama, and people barely notice that before of the relatively small size of the image.

The old panorama for my work place. Check the larger version by clicking on the image and notice the first pillar from the left (top part) and the first square on the roof on the right side of the building (from the left). These were stitching errors. Also The front of the building is taken off a bit, and the vertical lines are not supposedly, vertical, and that made removing the building on the far right a difficult task. The image itself is also somehow, too much elongated I presume.

In this old panorama, which I assembled by my EF-S 18-55mm lens. Almost, as far as I remember, I needed 20 angles or more to take up for the whole building in 2 rows, and that was in portrait position as well. 

EF-S 18-55mm

 Now with my Fisheye everything had changed, and even in the stitching process. It took only 5 angles in portrait position to take up for the whole building, and in stitching process there was a bit more creativity and guess what? The optimization in PTGui itself was more friendly to my necessities and showed "Very Good" sign even!

By the stitching process, I worked out 2 versions for the new panorama. The first one was keeping a straight look to the building and giving a sense of spaceous surrounding, while the truth is, actually, I barely had a stand in front of the building because of all the junk behind me. Not only that, but also, any slight movement or change in position was to block my view, and hence, the camera as well.

Rectangular and straight new panorama.

 There had been a problem in stitching as well but they were not as serious as the previous one. It is the same square on the roof that keep on breaking... I wonder if he has something against me or so!
Anyway, the good part is that the vertical lines are kept vertical and still, and the building part on the far right was removed. The bad story here is that, and because of the stretching to make the panorama straight, the 2 green pillars on the far left were stretched as well, giving unpleasant look, but maybe in a small size they do well? The reason for this is that, as I think, because I was not standing exactly in the middle point of the building but rather in front of the door (which is not exactly in the middle) and that makes these pillars far away and hence more curved originally (vanishing point concept?), which makes them stretch in a hard way when straightened. This is one point to bear in mind next time - Always try to take a middle point in such cases.
The sun glare was also stretched along with the image here, making bigger than the original spots. But that I think is left for the viewer, maybe some of them think the glare is nice while others like the image to be glare-less. 


The second case or version of the same panorama and the same collection of images of course, was to keep the fisheye look as the old one but this time, we have a more elegant look, and compact space with vertical lines being vertical indeed and removing the bits of that annoying building on the right;

Fisheye look panorama.

The fisheye look is my favorite for wide buildings if I should say, and specially when the horizontal lines are curved, but the vertical lines are kept straight.
Personally, I underetimated the importance of keeping the vertical lines as vertical when taking photos of buildings. This was one of the tips that I've learned in Adrian Schulz's book, "Architecture Photography".

 

I did wonder all the time what is the importance of keeping the vertical lines as vertical, and why shouldn't we have more like, fanciful looks for the buildings in photographs or so, but seems elegance has its own ways. I do now prefer to try hard to keep my vertical lines vertical indeed, whenever possible.

The new panoramas were all prepared in HDR and then tone-mapped in Photomatix (seriously, I don't the time to play around with manual tone-mapping now). The looks on the web is not really what I did see on my monitor when I was preparing these images, because I was using the ProPhoto color space (gamut). For people who do not know, it might be useful to read the Wikipedia article here. It is a color space founded by Kodak. You can think of the "color space" or "gamut" as to be, "how much colors I'm allowed to use in here?". The original panoramas had this turquoise look and splashes of green and blue intermixed, but I think it all goes back to sRGB color space (standard RGB) when the pictures are uploaded. I don't have much experience on what is allowed where when it comes to color spaces, but a ProPhoto color space is something huge and I think it gives more freedom when it comes to color picking and creative venturing. In fact, many stock sites advise the uploaders to make sure that their images are in sRGB format, because it is the most common, but I do hope a change comes on the way, because such colors are amazing. We would end up having the same problems of preparing and adjusting the colors from RGB to CMYK just before the final print comes out. It is a non-pleasant experience according to what I've done so far.

By coincidence, and as I was roaming the net looking for stuff to fill my junk yard with, I came across a software that seems it would fit my needs when it comes to viewing HDR files (Radiance and OpenEXR). It's called Panorado, and although the name looks it is specific for panoramic purposes, but in the description it mentions that it can view the HDR and EXR files, and this is my main aim. It has nice features mentioned as well, like viewing a panorama in 360 degrees, but of course I didn't try it so far, so I cannot tell. However, my main purpose would be to view HDR files (Radiance or OpenEXR) without the need of opening up Photoshop to do so. It costs $29.95. I think it is fair enough with multi-tasker of a program!

Now all what you've read so far was actually the product that I wrote mostly yesterday to be posted today, so now imagine I'm re-typing all of that now. When I had the time to do that? Well, after coming from the garage. I really discovered there is a new meaning for the word "Garage" actually by this visit to that place. "Garage" can also mean "torture". Supposedly the weather is still spring and I felt my brain cooked in the sun waiting in that queue line for more than one hour, just to get my brakes in merely 10 minutes. Very nice.

Recently, I've been feeling a bit sorry after reading the latest entry in Jonathan Boakes' Blog, about selling a cottage. This cottage was part of one of the most brilliant games I've ever played, which was designed mainly by Jonathan himself of course - The Lost Crown: A Ghosthunting Adventure.

 The cottage in the game itself gives a calm atmosphere (in daytime scenes!), and when I see it now in real in photographs, I still keep on that opinion about it. The situation reminded me somehow of Failaka island and how it became such a deserted place by now, although it has some potential of being a resort or anything, along with the other islands like Miskan (which is said to have still a lighthouse built by the British soldiers back in 1918).

Some deserted places in Failaka island, which was greatly depopulated during/after the war in 1990.

Although I hope to see some life come to such places, but I also do not wish to see it condensed like a city. I always hold the belief that an island, should remain an island; some isolate place away from the troubles in the city.

__________
601. while the men of Beten Yamta went to Ázúf
602. Alexander remained in his place preparing for his journey
603. and the last memories of Ázilis sparked his mind
604. then he remembered how Ázilis pointed to Charnagút
605. and he was wondering for the reasons of this point
606. but Ázilis did not say anything about Charnagút
607. although he was pointing to it during his speech
608. Alexander knew there is something hidden and some secrets
609. all might be clear when he reaches the appointed lands
610. just before the next full moon of Shaieb
611. then the hero went out of the tribe place to the desert
612. and to the south he traveled away for days
613. all the way he was feeling someone is following him
614. between the dunes and the mounts and hills
615. but he never noticed anyone, and thought its only an imagination
616. for the heat of the desert can make false images to the minds
617. some days the hero spent in the desert passing through ruins
618. and wondering where the promised land could be
619. until he reached the coasts of the Great Lake
620. the largest lake in Daynur and in the middle of lands
621. and Alexander walked along its western coast going south
622. without any rest either in day or night time
623. because the night of the full moon is approaching
624. and he must be in between the two waters