Busy and Lazy

Been some time since I typed something in here. Since the last Thursday at work, all what I was thinking of is to get some sleep sleep sleep. I'm reflecting back on my life now as I see so much time was spent without typing a single poem, or writing some lines in my story or doing translation. All what I was thinking of is my vacation.
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.

Officially, 29.

Well, the day that I dislike the most had passed. My birthday. Not only that, but it was on a Monday. My morning was the usual: going to do the fingerprint. Although I had some plans to go to the coast and take some pictures at night, at Monday's midnight, for the Kuwait towers beside some other buildings on the coast. Unfortunately, I was so tired and dizzy after dropping my friend back home, so I just headed back home to have a nap. I left the camera in the car, thus when I went to do the fingerprint by the morning it was there and I had the chance to snap again, but not into the glass dome (though I wished to do so), but on some other plant on the outside of the building. I had triple shots every time I snapped at it, and in every time I change the settings of the shot, from A-Dep to Av (Aperture priority). I think the best result was taken by the Av setting, with aperture being smallest, and thus I got a blurry background and a focus on the foreground or the subject of my shot.
After I made the HDRs at home, which by now are like a standard for my shots (and they take lot of space in the camera and on the hard disk), I had to change and fix the colors to give some effect. One effect that I made by coincidence was that when I changed from the 32-bit format into 8-bit format (usual task to do when you combine your images into HDRs), I changed some settings (without going into details) and it made that dreamy effect on the image. Usually I make this effect by making 2 layers of the same image, and blurring the above layer a bit and blending it as "soft light."
One other effect I made with this plant, and it was my favorite, it was the dramatic effect, where the colors and hues give a sense of antiquity and/or drama. Pale.

The image above contains a cut-out of the 3 main shots with their color manipulations. I used to think that HDRs make some twist in colors, but now I think I was wrong. I guess it is all about fixing the degree of exposure and making the details of the object show up equally in shade and highlight. Sometimes I become an addict of something and can't stop doing it, so I hope I won't be an addict to HDRs, or else I might lose chances of some nice shots where equal exposure is not an ultimate aim or desire.
You might have noticed already that I changed the email address that I put as a watermark on my images. I think since I put images on this blog, I better use the gmail address instead, specially that this is a blog about the Ayvarith conlang after all.

One of the amazing things that happened to me yesterday, that is my birthday, I received a phone call by 10 O'clock almost from a relative, who got me into lot of troubles before, and this time he was telling me to be prepared to attend to some expert and do some paperwork. Well, it is a tiny paperwork as it seems for now. What makes me annoyed is the fact that he called me on the 17th, not 16th and not the 18th (today), but specifically at this date to tell me about such thing. I hate courts and authority stuff... I have some bad allergy against them, and in a country like this where the law is mixed with myths (yes, myths), I don't find it digestible to be in the periphery of such places. I'm writing these lines while sweating hard even after washing my face when I got back. Now, I'm waiting for some time and then get to some computer with electronic leaves system (the new system applied here) in order to make changes to my leave. My plane is supposedly to fly on 29th at 2:15 a.m., but I found out that my leave really starts up on 30th! I got mixed up with the dates when I started to do the stuff around here. I was really nervous and in a hurry. Always been in a hurry in fact.

Because of this running up and down, I don't think I'm able to hold the pen and write down the translation, but I'd rather think of some events to take place in my story. I'm spreading myself too thin in projects that I cannot finish as it seems. If I do take stimulants to peek up my performance with these, I think it would take me like a week to have a heart attack. Also in the meantime, I sent some scans of my own handwriting to get some analysis. I made an analysis like 2 months ago, and I got some interesting results. I might post the analysis here one day, well, after removing sensitive points that is!

I performed as well one experiment for a 360 degrees panorama and rendered the images with spherical coordinates. I found out that I can make a 3D environment and make it interact with the mouse dragging and clicking, but unfortunately I'm no expert in such things so I can't say how to put it on the web. I think Flash or Java is required here (2 things that I know NOTHING about). After all, still, I made a still panoramic view for my room (which sucks) in a 360 degrees rotation. The images are taken only for a mid-height band and I would need similar work to represent the room completely. Tedious work that I don't need for the time being! But it would be fantastic to let others be in your room without leaving their chair on the other end, right?!

Click to see the full image

The original panorama image was actually 8 meters wide (around 27ft?). You'd need a CD to copy that image in PSD format!
However, the repititive sequence of the image is natural since the images were taken in a circle around the room, and hence the repeated door and stuff beside it. Though it would be cool to have a room with 2 doors like in ig castles! One door to the main hall and the other would be out directly to jump into the yard! Weeeeeeeee... (thud)!