Reflections…

Well, unfortunately, this will be kind of quick here since I was lazy in the past 2 weeks but nevertheless I'm trying to do something, along with the endless sleeping problems! I'm now being optimistic about a venture in astrophotography, but I'm not sure of it yet and I'm still doing experiments on that side of the photography spectrum. I wanted to show some results here but unfortunately that didn't work and many things kept me from working fast (some off them related to the rains and the weather). Anyway, I was able to work on one image, indoors, and I'd like to talk about it here.

Reflections

To begin with, I had this idea for a long time actually and I tried to work with it a bit but stopped because of the "conditions." Now, however, I've persisted little bit and with the help of my new acquired Case Air tethering tool, I was able to work easier and smoother with my camera while not being behind it (this is despite the limitations with Case Air already).

Case Air Tethering Tool

This idea required a mirror, and thus what better place to shoot in would that be other than the bathroom!? My bathroom, unfortunately again, didn't help a lot with this, so I had to move to another bathroom in the house and try my luck there. After changing in between lenses (mainly the Voigtländer 20mm and Canon EF 50mm), I've decided to settle down with the old nifty fifty, because the 20mm would be too wide and showing details I don't really like to add (meaning more cropping later on), plus the need for the wide aperture here to keep things out of focus properly (Voigtländer's 20mm widest is f/3.5 while Canon's 50mm widest is f/1.4).

Reflecting On Reality

Kenko's Big Stopper.

Initially, and at the back of my head, I've envisioned this shot in B&W and not in colors, as I think that monochromatic images show feelings in a drastic way more than colors do (and I'm speaking of human feelings, specially those related to the dark side of the personality). I wanted to really add the two sides (the real and the reflection) in framing the image but switching to 50mm and the lack of space made that impossible, and I could not use any other lens (Sigma 12-24mm was a choice but I have no filter to fit its 82mm diameter). The idea was to take two exposures; A normal one, and a long one and then combine them together in post-processing phase. For this reason, a ND filter was needed, thus I've used Kenko's big stopper (10 stops) for a bit of an "extreme" light stopping, and actually it didn't slow the shutter speed drastically (that is more than one minute so to say) - about 35 seconds were enough for a good exposure, but this is normal I guess since I was using f/1.4, and probably the lighting in the bathroom was quite efficient!
The rest of the job was then a work for Photoshop: Converting to B&W, adjusting the curves and tones and emphasizing the features with the help of dodge and burn. This is all what is it about actually when it comes to B&W; No colors to try to fix and remove casts, but still not an easy job when it comes to a pretty dramatic look, and tones must be delicately changed. In fact, I did have a problem when I merged the two photos and worked with layer masks to hide and add features in between the two; The traces of the layer mask's limits were apparent (i.e. the brush strokes made a turbulence of the exposure or a mismatch in the area surrounding them). To solve this problem I had to soften (blur) the layer mask until it was all ironed out.
Looking at it now, I do have some thoughts about the posture though (like, maybe, I should have done that with my arms extended on the mirror?), and maybe my hair should have been wet a bit? Anyway, no time to think about an image that is done already for the time being as more ideas are cooking and I'm still not doing much about them!

Finale

As you can see, here's only one photo I'm talking about its creation and I wanted to share some more but, as usual, my life has been erratic along with my sleeping pattern and body issues. Getting older I guess.
One of the things that is really getting me excited nowadays is discovering that it is possible to do some astrophotography without a tracker! A tracker is an addition (luxurious somewhat) to enable shooting the sky (specially deep sky objects) without causing star trails. The process a bit a complicated though (typically) and requires taking lot of images and shooting "light" and "dark" frames beside other shots and all that is fed to Deep Sky Stacker (which consumes a LOT of resources from my PC when working with). This is beside the ability to shoot in urban areas using the H-alpha filter to reduce or eliminate the light pollution. All that is good news, but I'm still having some issues here with this work and I'm trying to figure out the ins and outs of it; Needless to say, I'm still having a hard time to focus the lens into a blank sky already (I usually do test shots before doing the actual work of shooting to see how focus the lens is). Let's hope I have something new to write about in this blog (and in my Arabic blog) in the next few days!
On a side note, it seems I've kind of settled down to travel, maybe by September, I'm still not sure really. The thing is, many events are happening and my nerves are in need of "liquid nitrogen" literally to keep them cold and hard. Starting from family issues to moving my workplace further away from its current situation - lot of fuss, lot of paperwork, lot of questions, and lot of self doubt inside of me as whether I can cope with driving that distance everyday with my eyes condition. I already hate it as it is. The transfer or maybe the new location must be in use or active by September already; The time I usually have my vacations in. All I want right now is to be left alone, specially at work. Unfortunately, not many people understand this, or maybe they don't want to?