Alexander 6, V84.

 I've determined to break the spell of Mondays this Monday, but I'm not sure I'm succeeding with this or not! So far, not much annoyances!
I've finally signed for my leave, for 33 days (including holidays and weekends, which will be added back to my leave's account later on). It shall start from September 26th till October 28th. I will be back to Kuwait, hopefully after spending the vacation in Ireland then, by the 16th, and hence I would have 12 free days to spend around here before starting to work by November. Just like the last year. It was a real mess to ask for this leave because of the stupidity hovering over this place; some people do it by paper and some people (like me) must do it electronically in this damned system. Last year, when I signed for such leave from work, they dropped down the salaries of 3 months in advance into my account, and that made me some troubles in some aspects. All the fuss was to make sure that I get my salary regularly as it should be. I really don't know who makes such stupid laws!!! Be sure if I knew him or her, I'm going to assassin them.

Spent my day yesterday downloading the pictures of the panoramas taken from the labs and my office. Also, I took several free images from the outside of my building which is now like a battle field with all the reconstruction work going on and all the bricks been thrown away and made into piles and hills in front of my work place! The total number of images exceeded 300!
Coming to measure it:

• Each row needs 12 angular shots.
• Usually, 3 vertical angles needed.
• Not always but count it in, one zenith and one nadir shot, total 2 (and can be 4).
• We have here 3 rooms.
• Going to shoot into HDR, means we need exposure bracketing, and that means 3 shots in each angle.
• Total: 12x3x3(HDR) + (2x3) = 114 shots. For one room. All 3 rooms then are 114 x 3 = 342 shots.

Adding also those tiny shots I took from the outside which I can't remember how many, then I would say it easily exceeded 350 shots. All in RAW format (to allow me for more manipulations before merging into HDR, specially when it comes to the White Balance factor). Because of this, a 8GB CF memory card is essential!

The process of stitching was fair and went smoothly, even for the narrow lab or what we call here the "anti-compton" lab, after a device of this time. The main work now is to enhance the zenith and the nadir, which are naturally, almost always hard to stitch. In fact in the 2 labs panoramas, I've taken the nadir but I decided not to put it on the stitching process. The best thing to do probably is to clean the nadir BEFORE the stitch. I find cleaning AFTER the stitching process is over is a bit hard to do because of the wide are and the stretching that occurs naturally for the bottom of the image (because of the spherical projection of course). Usually what you see in QTVRs is that the artists put or fix some sort of a label including the name of the artist and the location and/or the date of creation. Maybe I should do this and spare myself the headache, even though I don't know how, still.
So far though, I got 2 tiny problems. The first was that in shots taken at a lower angle (pointing the camera downward that is), parts of the tripod shown up and hence, we have to do some cleaning and cloning job here. The second one is some weird artifacts occured in the Gamma Lab panorama, and they looked very much like parallax errors, but some inspection into that revealed to me that for some reason (and maybe it is even my own mistake when the shoot was on), some slices of the panorama were having a lower range of exposure (i.e. darker) from the other slices surrounding it, thus when the computer blends in together all the slices and trying to find a suitable blend, you get smudges that would look like more like breaks or like some ink plots. To fix this problem I opened those slices individually, and opened some adjacent slices for comparison, I then raised the exposure value for these dark slices to match the adjacent slice, as much as possible. The process was "fine" but issued some noise that I need to smooth out later on, after tone-mapping.
There were also some weird noise not related to the problem above, appeared as some pink spots on some various areas. This problem occured mainly after tone-mapping, but hopefully it is easy to eliminate.

Can't wait to leave this office and get back to work on these panoramas. The real challenge now is the office panorama, in which I included myself in. A moving object in a panorama shoot is not a sweet topic, at all!
__________
1993. Alexander felt a headache and looked around hime
1994. he recognized that he is in a small house made of wood
1995. then he looked at Kaliván and said: where am I?
1996. Kaliván replied: in my humble house O hero!
1997. then Alexander asked: what happened?
1998. Kaliván then went on telling the story
1999. "you made the Mikanazzar fly away from the tree,
2000. and when it got angry it attacked you with rage,
2001. thus it passed through your heart and body,
2002. and took some of your power and made you weak,
2003. and you fell down and fainted with no power to move,
2004. thus Aramramátáníth chased after Mikanazzar,
2005. and she banished him out of the valley for now,
2006. then she endowed you with some power to heal,
2007. you will need some time to rest for now,
2008. she ordered me to take you home and care for you,
2009. until you become sound again, she shall talk to you,
2010. Oh! what a great honor is that to have her talk to you!
2011. you must be someone special O good king!"
2012. with a little headache Alexander asked Kaliván
2013. "you brought me to your home? how that is possible?"
2014. and Kaliván answered him with a laughter
2015. "thank your Cadid, he is a loyal servant for you,
2016. I released his chains and he helped me"

Alexander 6, V11.

This is one tiresome day. I couldn't resist sleeping in my office at all, so I had to "snooze" off for about 2 hours! Thank God I got a flexible condition here.
I did one big experiment yesterday, at night, and hence the results still did not show up yet to post them here; I took a 360 panorama of the living room (which we call usually as a "hall"). It was a tiresome task, not for the complexity of the process (which does not change whatsoever), because the people there! Mom and sister were there only and then accompanied by my younger brother and all was such a fuss trying to control and stop people from going into the scene when the camera was working with the shutter.
The total images were around 168 images taken with 3 shots per angle (making it for around 56 angles of view). After finishing I went on right away and combined the images into EXR with the help of the batch processor of Photomatix, and also once again I batched them (in another folder) under Exposure Fusion process with certain parameters. I'm not quite satisfied with the general yellowish-brown hue of the hall (it is really like that), thus I will check later if I can change this to something more pleasant. Now you know why I was awake all night and did not have enough sleep!
This morning I tried to do a sample stitch for the EF version, and for some reason, there was some blurred area in the perview, although I'm almost sure that all images were taken in fine sharpness! I had to leave to damn work thus I couldn't investigate it more, but I shall do so of course once I go back home. It IS going to be a tiresome sleepless day.
Just now, I realized that I did sort of a mistake. I could use the camera in portrait position. I think that would reduce the time and the number of shots radically, like I did with our lab before;

 

Gamma Spectroscopy Lab - CRER, Kuwait University.

The difference here is that this image was taken normally without any intention for HDR, thus the shots were lesser by a factor of 3 than it would be normall for HDR. However, the advantage of using the portrait position instead of the landscape position (for me) in capturing such panoramas is that, and because I use the method of connecting points in the viewfinder of the camera when rotating the camera around its axis, that requires later on to elevate the camera up and down (in case your intention was a 360 spherical panorama). The farthest distance in the viewfinder can be found between the leftmost and rightmost dots, thus with neglecting the zenith point (above ur head directly), you can do 2 rows of images; one is low and the other is high, and then the nadir and zenith come in bottom and on top respectively. In my case yesterday (and I was working on degrees engraved on the tripod and not by the viewfinder), I had to take 5 rows of images in landscape position (not counting zenith and nadir), a row at each angle of: 0, +30, +60, -30, -60 degrees. "0" angle is the horizon of course or the mid-line of the panorama.

Now in portrait you might need only 2 angles (or 3 if you feel unlucky), as I did with the picture above. First, I fixed the camera in horizontal position (still in portrait of course) and I make a note about where the center dot resides. I, then, tilt the camera downward to make the uppermost dot reside in that place in the viewfinder, that was occupied by the center dot. I do the same for the upward direction where I fix the lowermost dot in the viewfinder into that center point. To insure that a stitch would go smooth with control points, I might as well take a third row of images from the center itself. Now if you have fisheye lens with 180 HFoV of course all your life problems would be, almost, over. All what you might need then is simply 4 angles and you're over with it and the rest would be a work on PC to unwrap the fisheye image (and fix aberration). Not only that, but you can just capture a skydome by lowering the camera as much as you can and pointing your camera upward exactly at 90 degrees and hence you got a view of the surroundings in one shot (or 3 if you like it in HDR, ore more if you want a more professional HDR let's say). The work later on is on PC for unwrapping the images.

I'm quite surprised by some manufacturers of photography tools when they put a label or a comment on their products or softwares and say "designed to lessen the time spent in front of the PC and make you spend more time behind the camera," or something that goes like that anyway. The thing is, most of the art is in the PC as I believe. Yes, I do require an easy-going program when I deal with things but if professionality requires complexity a bit, then I wouldn't mind spending more time facing the monitor; this is the fun! I'm not a busy man with my camera, specially with the lack of inspiration these days, and thus, spending more time in front of the monitor is not a big deal for me (the only thing is when I NEED to play a game or so and leave the images-work for some time). If the software is good I presume, for example, and that makes it complex, then it better be able to fix the errors done by the camera or the composition or the lighting coditions in the scene, and hence this is the real benefit as I believe! Less time behind the camera, more time in front of the PC. Why? Well, in past posts (last year) I guess I told you about some stories when I was stopped by security guys and by cops for many reasons and permit is required and all the blah blah blah with that. In such cases, I do need indeed lesser time behind the camera and finish everything as fast as I could and run back home to do what I want, and fix my errors that I HAD to do. I'm not pushing you to be an outlaw like I do (ah yeh), but there are many occasions when you are not comfortable in some situation and MUST hit and go. I think it is just my style that I can't take pre-planned images but I have to hit and run as usual, or just snap something beautiful I saw on my way while driving on some road.

Anyway, I leave you now with Alexander 6, verse 11. I have to look now after some cleaning brushes for the damn sensor!

__________
241. this talk sparked the pains in Alexander
242. he can see the events in front him
243. like it is happening in that moment
244. just like it happened before thirty years
245. when his father, the glorious, fell in a trap
246. arranged by demons and wizards who followed them
247. because he banished them from his lands
248. because he punished them so hard
249. he can remember the image of his father
250. when he fell on the floor unconscious
251. and his skin turned red and purple
252. while his body was like a piece of wood
253. when the wizards and witches attacked
254. accompanied with demons on their sides
255. and started to eat the flesh
256. just before he attacks them with his Charnagút
257. young he was at that time but he never forgets
258. the pains accompanied him all the way
259. until he buried his father under the sea
260. so no one would reach the body or see
261. and he could remember the face of Kadmún
262. the demon who who poisoned his father by trick
263. and the demon who tried to get his father's heart
264. how shall he forget the face of such cruelty?