Perfect Week...

It had been a hard week already, and for the coming few days as well. I didn't complete all my work time in Sunday and went on a short leave, and took the rest of the week as a leave to finish some issues with my car leasing. I just hate cars.
Saturday was not my day definitely. I had to go to work as early as 9 o'clock or before that even and work on moving some devices with my colleague. On that day and while I was so sick of the perfectionism trait, I received a phone call from my leasing company telling me that I must get the car back after 2 years of leasing. I can almost swear that I called back in November and the guy told me that I have to get it back on February and not now. And to make my day, the date to get the car back was January 2nd, and on Saturday it was already January 9th. Thus, some fine to be paid for the delay. All of that really screwed my mind. Cars aren't something I do enjoy really.
I was preparing myself for some days to be without a car but anyway, by phone calls here and there, they told me that I can lease the car for another year at least, which supposedly would spare me from the fine and being without a car. Today I went on doing the paper things and I had to walk out of the office of that guy for one hour waiting for the customers to leave and to get into my turn. He was kind of surprised to know that I was waiting for him and said "why didn't you tell me? I thought you were waiting for the other guys in other office!" and I was like "duh?". In the beginning, I discovered it isn't easy as it sounds. As I had to leave the car and be indeed without a car for one day or two. But then looking at the stuff in the car and that I must remove them, he was convinced by my idea to come tomorrow but under the condition that I come as early as possible like 8 o'clock. Hopefully by then, I will take the car directly and finish everything and get a new contract. My mood can't bear with another silly event.


In the mean time I'm trying to enjoy myself a bit with my camera, as I did place an order for a 580EX II Speedlite Flash to be sent to my US Mailbox, and then to here. I didn't want to add the other filters and stuff that were placed in my wishlist, as I just want to test how reliable is this service even though I might sound a bit silly. But the problems really come from this country authorities, and not much from the outside. In the mean time I'm still doing some work on some family photos and new photos that I've taken around my place, and some pics taken previously from Ireland. The later brings me back to my short sweet memories back there... too bad that I won't be able to do it this year.





I've finally finished the brochure and it was one hellish nightmare to send over to my colleague by email. No single mailing server allowed me to send and most probably she had a problem with her email anyway. So, I had to upload the ZIP file into some uploading site and to let her download it later from home (since the site itself is blocked by our respectful ISP in my work place!).








Let's hope the guys in the press won't apply much stupidity effect to the print of this brochure for now. I got plenty of problems for now!





The above image was taken last Friday for unknown reason to my simple mind. It was so noisy (taken at ISO 800) and composed of 5 different shots. Maybe I was testing my aim or something? However, I cropped the noise that could not be filtered out with NeatImage at the edges and skewed the image a bit from the bottom to straighten the bulb out.


I'm planning to do some work on the translation in this vacational week, but with the tiresome time with my car here and there I feel so awkward and not ready... the office seems to be the only place to do all of that work. I will try to, maybe tomorrow...
In the mean time, I'm trying to find some meanings for my unconscious drawings, which I turned already into stock images. Some meaning lies there about my mind and my personality, but I just can't get a grasp on it...

TGIT...

The last day of the week and the weekend is here... but seems this weekend is going to be interrupted with work somehow after my boss asking me to be available, if possible, in the work place on Saturday to help on some exerperiment. Despite the fact that I always prefer to stay awake all night on weekend days and sleep till almost or past the midday, I don't really have any problem with being in the work place on a Saturday and doing some work. The only thing that bothers me, something else would and should be with us to do the experiment, and I'm sure it won't go without complications.
I had a go with my camera today around the place, and, I snapped some garbage dumbed near our building... you might ask what a garbage has of beauty, well, in HDR composition everything can be made into something... trust me!
This time, I shot 6 shots of RAW keeping almost 1 stop between each exposure set. It is a tiresome work and of course I won't be using it always specially if ghosting (shades of moving objects in the final image) would be a must. The process was to put a bracketing for the exposure with +/- 1 gap, and then with the AV control I moved the 3 cursors of bracketing to the far left and made 3 shots, and then move them back to the far right and made another 3 shots, and thus the final result was 6 images with -/+ 2, -/+ 1, and two 0 which after canceling one of them, we settle with 5 images. I don't know how the results would be, anyway, I read before that 3 images with +/- 2 gap is enough to make a fine HDR image, but the more bracketing you have, the smoother colors you would have as well.
The brochure is amost settled down for now and my boss gave me the permission to add my credit on it. Of course you might think it is natural since I'm the designer but well, I didn't feel like it until my boss announced it for me. Since it is a brochure that would be given to people and I didn't want to corrupt the facade with a little name in the margin! The next move is convert everything into JPG and tell the stupidos in the press to print it as it is with no addition or edition and fix it in a 3-fold brochure as we want. Still, I'm expecting problems in that way.


Continuing my work with some photos from Ireland again, and as I expected, Canstockphoto refused the HDR tone-mapped images. It wasn't a surprise really. However, I will try Exposure fusion more this time if I'm planning to get softer gradients of colors with more natural look.





These two images were taken almost at same location around the Waterfront, the place where I stayed in Ireland. I hope they look more natural here than others made before!
Now, with my camera with me... I'm planning to shoot The Dome again, but I need to come here earlier than I used to be. No need for parasites in my way as usual or people who greet me all the time. This time, I'm planning to keep my camera low as much as possible and try to revolve it (while it is flipped in 90 degrees) in a full circle. The previous shots were taken at each column holding the dome up, but the result was, of course, disastrous.
The yield for today is 3 verses, and I'm approaching the end of this torture to being another torture later on!