Mowaššaħiration!

Woah! What a relief! After passing more than half of Ramadhan going to work everyday, I am now relieved as I did start my little vacation for the last 10 days of the month of Ramadhan, which will be followed of course by Eid Al-Fitr (i.e. the feast). So we have here some good 2 weeks or a bit more even which I'm trying to fill it with everything I can grab; Sleeping, camera work, sleeping, gaming, sleeping, and of course typing something for this blog - Too bad I can't find any room for my conlanging activities though. Yet, I'm still posting weekly on my Ayvarith's Instagram page (every Friday), but honestly, I do miss working with the rest of the conlangs and scripts that I've used to create. I think though that it is a good thing to focus on one conlang for some time to develop it further. Anyway, as the time goes by, I'm slowly setting up my camera and working with the sky (no results so far) as well as doing some of the projects that I've been planning to do for a long time now.

Mowaššaħ-ired

Well, a fancy subtitle, parallel to "inspired." If the reader is not familiar with what "Mowaššaħ" is, well it is just a form of singing that developed and made popular in Andalusia during the Islamic/Arabian rule over the Iberian peninsula. I'm a fan of this folk art in general, specially when such songs are performed by Sabah Fakhri [صباح فخري].
One of these songs (or Mowaššaħát) sparked in me the idea of some photo that I wanted to perform for some time now (months in fact), and it took me a while to get that mood to work with it and even to decide about the look that I wanted. To be honest, I didn't decide about the look that I wanted UNTIL I've started setting up the lights and camera! But first, let me get you into the mood with me in this, with the Mowaššaħ itself:



I hope the recording is good enough though. Most of these recordings date back to the 90s and before. I think it is also proper to put the lyrics down so it would reflect on the image later on as I go through its details:

I Yearn with eagerness to some lands - Where in I've seen the beauty of Salma

I've drank therein intoxicated water - From the hand of the cold drink bearer

The inspiration here comes from the first verse of the first line only. Even though, personally, listening to this music time after time gets me somewhat in an intoxicated mood. As I've mentioned before, I didn't really realize how would go about preparing or shooting this one, but I had 2 major images in my head: a globe, and a face (my face of course since I have no one to help and because it reflects something in me).

أحن شوقاً
Yearn with Eagerness

As I started putting the gear in another room to try and figure out what to do, I realized then that I would be sitting looking at this globe miniature. However, I wanted movement, and that yields that I must use a slow shutter, and a slow shutter yields the fact that I drag the shutter (or use the 2nd-curtain sync mode). Ridiculously, this option cannot be activated with my speedlites UNLESS the speedlite is connected to the camera AND no wireless option is turned on. Unlike the HSS mode (i.e. high-speed mode), where I can connect a speedlite to the camera and control another speedlite via wireless to shoot in HSS, this is not the case with 2nd-curtain sync. For those who do not really know what is 2nd-curtain sync: If you take a regular shot using a speedlite for a moving object with a relatively slow shutter speed, the movement would appear backward, and hence the 2nd-curtain option would be required to trigger the flash JUST before closing the shutter at the end of the exposure (of course we are talking here in terms of milli- and microseconds). Why would I need it for the globe? Well, I was turning this by hand and if the speedlite was triggered at the beginning of the exposure, my hand could be there obscuring the view (because the speedlite light would freeze the motion at the moment it strikes the body while the shutter is open). However, trying hard to make it all in a single shot, my trials were in vain. The globe itself didn't even budge with an air blower! I could move it by hand, but it was hard to move it with air, however strong it was (almost flipped the miniature itself but the globe itself didn't move!). So, it was time to break it down to chunks, and collect them together in post-processing.

The first chunk was to record the globe as it rotates separately, and then shoot myself for another chunk and merge the two. That also didn't work because the motion blur of the globe was not so obvious; I was using the ambient and flash light together here (and even used ND filter but then removed it) to fix the situation, but probably the shutter speed should have been a bit faster? slower? I really couldn't say. So, I ended up shooting several shots for the globe on various positions and then simply blending them together in post-process, in hope that that would give out a motion sense! Looking at it now, I don't think it is so though, except, maybe, for some apparent shake on the edges of the sphere (in the full size image) which mark some motion is there. This shake, I believe, is not a real motion shake, but merely an artifact from overlapping various frames; I believe.

100% Crop for one side of the globe in the original image.
Click to enlarge.

Left to say, I've tried to add some "dreamy" look to the whole image in post-processing (using specific techniques in editing). I would be using the Clarity slider if it was one image only, but with such a blend, it would be hard kind of balance all together across the frames. I did in fact use the Clarity slider for one frame, and that's the one including me, to reduce the rigidness of my face! After finishing the whole blend, I've added a golden tint to the whole image; Something which I've tried to introduce using the white balance in-camera but it didn't work quite well (the effect was hard to notice so to say).

Finale

Here we go; One project down and some few others left! And I need to work around them ASAP before my vacation is over and be back to the daily routine the fatigue. In fact, I wanted to talk about another image which I've created this week in this blog post, but I've preferred to keep it for another post (otherwise this thing would be way too long here!).
Meanwhile, I'm trying to have the time with myself, isolating myself from the rest of the world because apparently I'm not on the same page as the world is. It's hard to explain or maybe it is hard for ME to explain but it is like the feeling how you feel when you think about something being a complete waste of time and effort, and no use in trying to fix it. This is close to what I feel in the current days. The thought of resigning and just get some time for myself is a frequent visitor to my mind, but yet I do realize the serious consequences of such decision. And this is what keeps me walking; Just walking…
Well, for the time being, let me just get rid of those ideas that I'm bound to work with my camera for the time being, and let's hope I do catch something interesting in the sky other than the simple stars that I usually catch now... now that would be such a great breakthrough!

Another boring "deep sky" shot (stack of shots in fact) with lot of artifacts.
Shot on May 28^th, using Hα filter (converted to B&W).