Grace...

Mom is finally back home right now, but that doesn't mean the end of the story. In fact, I think the struggle had just began now to elevate her spirit and make her cope what life throws at her, specially with boring hours of dialysis.
We are hoping now that the dialysis process is a temporary procedure until Creatinine is reduced to some level. All we can do for now is to pray for her and, of course, be on her side as much as possible. The other challenge from our side is to cope with life's schedules and rush with an added responsibility like this. We've been managing for the past 3 weeks by having leaving from work and changing shifts among family members, but at a certain point, I believe Mom has to be alone at home, probably with the maid only to help her out.

One of the greatest challenges for me right now is to try and work on with my camera after being mostly idle in the past weeks. Not completely idle, but I was aiming at various things without thinking just to try out my camera and not stop using it. Mainly I was aiming at geometrical shapes in flowers, specially those sent to Mom in the hospital. I won't bother you with the technical details here, but most of the images here were taken with 50mm lens plus some extension tube(s) beside using one or two speedlites (580EXII and 430EXII).

Blooming Alone

Sanfte Aufbau

Zentrum Aufbau

The Dark Side of Beauty

Introvert Petals

Lumini

Vortex

Floral Fractal

Mother's Heart

Die Sanfte Ringe

New Toys:

With the rush of the events lately I've ordered some new toys for my camera that I've barely touched or experienced something with. I hope in the coming days I will do this accordingly.

Source: B&H

One of the simplest "toys" here is a step down ring which is aimed at fitting filters on lenses with different diameters. My ring here is a step down from 62mm to 58mm (62-58mm) which I got specifically for my Tamron lens (70-300mm). Most of the lenses that I'm using have a diameter of 58mm and hence most of my filters (polarizer and IR for example) are ordered accordingly to this diameter. In order to make these filters somehow complete and fit all, this step down ring can do the job. The only problem here is that it sometimes gets stuck in between or stuck into the filter read itself. Typical problem (and I'm planning to get special wrenches to detach filters from lenses).

Source: B&H

The other toy is an eyepiece from Polaroid which acts as an extension at a right angle. It is supposed to be quite useful for shooting at waist level but I didn't test it for long. One of the hardships in this piece is how to fit it into my camera. It comes with plenty of adapters for various cameras (specially EOS cameras) but unfortunately, there is no direct adapter for EOS 7D camera and I had to make several tests. I could hardly fit one of the adapters into my 7D and I'm not sure it is quite useful for shooting at waist level but probably more useful to shoot on sides (i.e. to be on the side of the camera and look into the eyepiece). I will leave this for time to sort out its benefits.

Source: B&H

Maybe the most important toy for me right now (and didn't try it yet!) is the Ubertronix Strike Finder trigger. Some years back I got a cumbersome circuit to trigger the flashes by sound (and needed the PC cable to connect it to the flash but never got this cable). This trigger now is all-in-one type: sound, motion, laser and lightning. The difference here though is the fact that it is a camera trigger (and it comes with N3 cable to be connected in the place of the cable remote into the camera). Without trying it all seems good, but with one thing: the short cables and sensors. I want to try this as soon as possible but yet I didn't formulate any ideas on how to do so. The trigger box contains a jack port saying "flash/camera" thus I do believe I can connect it to flashes (speedlites) by special cables too and it's not limited to cameras only. Among other models, this brand was the only one probably to support Canon EOS 7D. In a twist of options, it has the Laser gate, i.e. triggering the camera with the change in Laser reception as I understand it while other brands depend on infrared gate which triggers the camera only when an object crosses in between a transmitter and a receptor. I'm not sure though how I'm going to use the trigger for Laser but according to the instructions it works as well for infrared just that way, as well as for lightning photography. Too bad the lightning season is over right now!

Thoughts:

In the passing weeks, with Mom's sickness and up till this moment, I had some weird urge in geometrical wisdom and started to read whatever comes my way from Wikipedia; specially the schläfli symbol. There were many stuff that were complicated of course and my mind couldn't digest but reading about simple stuff could spark some imagination. Reading about mathematics and geometry can never be in vain - it is up to you of course!
I'm trying in the meantime to look at the problem with Mom's health as a test for something; probably to change my attitude toward the world, probably to test my capabilities of challenging the world with increasing responsibilities and yet keeping up with my own projects and photography. Mom cared for us as a mother would do, and her memories still race in my mind at the moment; memories of some time when I was 10 years old or less and how she used to dress me for school. Despite the health problem is upon her, but it is our test, her children. Probably God wants to see how we do care for her and I'm lying my hope in succeeding in this test. After all, I arrived to the realization of the fact that at some time, at some moment in time, there should be that point of departure between her and me as it is the case always with every living thing. My only prayers go to make this point in time just far away; far enough in time to make me stronger to bear it. I've realized as well the fact that just wishing to depart life before her so I wouldn't have to see her leave me alone in this world is a mere selfish thought. Mothers can't bear the departure of their kids from her sight - it is me who has to bear it all instead...

Waiting...

It feels more like running after something you can't catch and never will. This how my week was. Traffic jams, anger bursts, and completely thrown off by mood swings and not able to manage anything, well, almost everything.
I was hoping that my shipment would arrive by the middle of this week to have some time to test them, but unfortunately, thanks to the customs and procedures, still the shipment is not released up to this moment so far. The shipment had been in the country since last Saturday.

My shipment consists of 3 items: a) Rokinon 8mm lens, b) Lateral extension for tripods, and c) adapter ring from Cokin (62mm). And yes, the 8mm lens is a fisheye lens; another one!

A. Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens:

Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens
Source B&H

According to the specs, this lens is specially designed to give a 180 degrees in the diagonal with cropped (APS-C type) camera; like my Canon EOS 7D. It is in fact designed specifically for Canon. This lens hopefully will give me more pace and speed when I work with panoramas (for the larger angle) and frankly, I'm not sure it will work completely fine but if I didn't try, I won't find out. Just to think of all the re-calibration for the VR-head to fit the new lens makes me shiver a bit. I was lucky with my Canon 15mm fisheye lens because the default setting of the VR-head was almost enough to reduce any parallax. But with this, I don't know how it will go. One of the biggest concerns for me now is the chromatic aberrations in hard light conditions.
My teacher in fact provided me with a new info, and that is, panoramas are usually taken with a 50mm lens (or normal lens) because this lens provides an angle of view almost identical to human's eye. Thinking about it, and with the crop factor in APS-C cameras, that means I would be needing something like 31mm lens to do a panorama (which is something I have in fact with my Canon EF-S 18-55mm). An idea for a new experiment with my lenses, but in what place and how, I don't know. Fisheye lenses though provide me with wide view and it is suitable to include full bodies within complete slides without the need to take 2 shots or more to include one body, just like I did previously with my work place panorama.

I'm Busy

I'm just noticing that the image is tilted a bit! Anyway, such inclusion of bodies in images would be hardly done on 30mm range because it will be zoomed in, unless of course the body is far away from the camera.

B. Lateral Extension:

Photek Tri-X-2500
Source B&H

I got the idea to purchase this extension after a little experiment with some of my prints. After thinking for a while I thought this might be helpful for me as well in taking a shot for the nadir point, providing that I get it elevated to the same level as the camera during the shooting process. This, however, is still debatable in my mind, because I will have to carry more tools with me, with the already stuffed bags and shoulders I'm already having. it would be awesome though to fit this on my monopod (which I didn't use for a while) and keep it ready with me so that after finishing the panorama, the nadir point would be the last to take in a quick manner.

Prints
The shot that made me think of a lateral extension.

C. Adapter Ring (62mm):

Cokin 62mm Adapter Ring
Source B&H

This adapter ring will be fitting my Tamron 70-300mm telephoto macro lens. Not sure how often I will be using my ND filters with my Tamron but to make things complete, and since I do have adapters for the rest of the lenses (except of the fisheye of course), so I thought I better complete the set with this ring as well. With Tamron's minimum aperture of f/45 or f/39 and some ND filters, this might enables me to put a new limit for long exposures experience with me!


I. Troublesome:
One of the problems that I've remained several days trying to fix is an old panorama that I've decided to re-do in a different view point. It's my home's panorama under the dust...

Being A Grain of Sand

This time though, it is about changing to WV form. The main problem was to eliminate the remains of the tripod and the VR-head, as usual. But here, the ground is unique and ordered, and there was no chance for random cloning. After spending days and days just looking at the ground and thinking, I seriously gave up. I've just cloned in a random way. Not a beautiful view, but no other way for me to do such a delicate work.

Under The Dust

I named it, by mistake, as well Under The Sand. Personally speaking, I'm not so fond of it like the older panorama. I've used Photo Filter adjustment layers and layer masks to make a contrast between yellow parts and the blue parts (boosting both). Well, the blue part specifically was not there originally but it had a tiny blue reflection on the car shade from the outside and gave me the idea of making it as you can see here.

II. Scribbles:
Back to the old habits a bit. I was given, for some reason which I don't know, a pack of soft papers, somehow like glossy papers but not glossy really. It's a small pack to be used in the office like stick-it-note but without the sticky part!
This type of paper is good for scanning in high resolution because it does not contain obvious pores. In previous times when I used to sketch randomly on normal papers, these pores would cause me troubles in scans and I would have to use excessive Median filter to eliminate these artifacts.
Anyway, I'm back to my random thoughts for some time now, and I seriously don't know what I'm doing...

17880

In case you are wondering why it's called 17880, just concentrate and you will know; maybe. After scanning, the sketch was copied 3 times and stuck together to form the shape above. In other words, my sketch was only a quarter of this design. I guess you can think of it as some... African art maybe? Anyway, I got problems saving such designs in vector format. I need to learn more about these files. Every time I upload the file I get an error from websites.

Now, I have to admit I've been lazy working with my Ayvarith recordings again but I need to pardon myself for now. It was really one heck of a week. Time to sit and wait for this shipment to be out from clearance...