Disappointment...

A sluggish week passed on. My vacation is over by now without doing something useful with my camera (or other projects). I was concentrating more on my camera work in fact.
I wanted to spend a night on Failaka island but the schedules with the ferry were screwed up and it was jammed in the middle of the week! I've never knew that people would go on it in the middle of the week that much; I was wrong with my calculations or it's just my luck, as usual. So, pictures from there was a far-reaching idea now.
On the other hand as well, I've tried to go inside the Aquarium, in the Scientific Center, to take pictures again like I did back in April, but I was disappointed and slammed out. I live in such a melancholic world indeed. Makes me urge myself to start some new vacation ASAP just to get away from all the restrictions here.

I've worked on plenty of images before going to Hajj, but it was a fast paced work to fill in my Ninth album from Ireland. Not much to be mentioned really. One panorama which was done before was done again but with time with change of the WB, which transformed the whole thing into some sort of a night scene. It was good enough for a QTVR but I was lazy to do a small one, only a large one (50MB in size) was done and kept for my own reference.

Living Night in Dominican Graveyard

Well, it's Thursday now and who knows what will happen. Nothing so special about this Thursday since I didn't start work yet (by next week), but maybe there is hope to do something with my camera? I hope...
In the meantime, I got two new books to read (or see). The first is How to Draw and Paint Fantasy Architecture, by Rob Alexander; the one I have has a different cover design than the one in Amazon, but the title and the author are the same!
The second book is The World Encyclopedia of Swords and Sabres by Harvey J. S. Withers. The one on Amazon is a bit different in title and cover colors, but the cover design is the same as mine. Ugh, the damn Amazon gadget in my blog window doesn't work to put the pictures of the books more easily!
I didn't start the second book yet. Hopefully, I can enrich my imagination and my sense of art by reading and viewing such books. I don't know how it would help me in photography but it might as well push me to do my own sketches, though I testify for myself that I've been bad with sketches, forever.

Well, time to post this and see what home chores I have to do (beside sleeping and eating). Until next Thursday, I hope more chances present themselves to me. It's really sluggish to have a camera without using it or being able to use it. Just out of boredom, I've decided to do something out of the context a little bit...

eĞalíŧ eĄiramramán yi adam liYifąal, hú liYadaą húta yisfal baYáħavah.

And don't ask for a translation please...

R.I.P.

Tiresome and a sad week, and the dust made it worse. After struggling with time and having hardships to pick "my" street cat to the vet, just few minutes before writing this I got a phone call from the vet to tell me that he died, after vomiting blood all night. One more thing to lose in my life... he was an animal... but sort of listens to me humbly even though he didn't reply back or show emotions... but at the end he used to listen. He used to lick my toes all the time. I always wondered why...

R.I.P. Tiger

I will try to get over it. For now, I have to think of coming projects with my camera. I got one project done almost perfectly, that was the peeling of a seashell...

Peeled Seashell

I say almost perfect, because the bottom of the shell was not added here, and the shell was somehow awkwardly positioned on some clay to make it stand in a right angle. Almost. The merging process was a tiresome but not as much as before (the angle of rotation was set to 30 degrees here instead of 10 degrees like I did last time, making 12 images horizontally). For this reason I had to cut the bottom somehow to remove the yellow clay piece that was used to fix the shell. I think I should not have added the tops as well since I added the topmost part (as you can see on the top of the left side). Well, one more experiment to learn from. The non-uniform shape of the shell helped me I guess to merge the different angles with not much easy-to-see errors I would say. Right now I'm planning to do the same process with a more regular shape: my old lovely censer...

Luminositatis

Like the previous shell, I've fixed the angle of rotation on 30 degrees, but this time instead of using the regular 80W plain flood light, I used a blue flood light, on the top. My main point in the beginning, actually, was to take a single shot after all, trying to find some good contrast between the blue light and the reddish body of the censer (or purplish) and the red interior when the candle is on, but I think I made it better than I thought myself. I didn't have this effect in my mind. Despite that the above image is a HDR composed of only 2 images (at 0EV and -2EV), yet, the single shots did not differ much in shades. The only thing I made it into HDR here is to control the light of the candle and reduce its luminance solely without reducing the exposure of the image, and HDR-way is more convenient for controlling the luminance level. Will work soon on a peeling effect for this censer as well.
However, this was not my first trial to play with lights, or as some call it "light painting". I did try something but it was not successful as I wished, but after all an image was produced and some people liked it already.

The Swedish Shell
Svenska Snäcka

The image here is in fact a tone-mapped HDR, which I worked hard with Photoshop to enhance. Thus, I can't really call it "light painting". In light painting, you are supposed to work majorly in Bulb mode (that is opening the shutter and closing it as you wish). Here it was so hard to do that because of the time I did it in, and because of the strength of the yellow light was much greater than the blue one, and it needs very precise timing to turn off one light and light the other AND not overexposing the image. I got rid of all of that and simply worked in HDR format. Photoshop was needed to enhance the contrast and pronounce the faint blue color more, and to remove (by cloning out) the clay piece that was holding the shell stand still.
Light painting is an interesting art with the camera but surely needs lot of practice and sensing your own camera sensor. Most probably ND filters would be needed here to control the exposure and avoid overexposing your image like I did here. It's a long story I need to work with some time later. Light painting is not necessarily done in Bulb mode of course, but this is usually the way it is done because in Bulb mode you have infinite time to work with until you close the shutter by yourself, while other moods like (M)anual and (T)ime (v)alue would limit you to 30 seconds maximum for a single shot. I remember though in my old Canon 350D, the Bulb mode was integrated within the (M)anual mode, but in Canon EOS 7D, it is a separate mode.

Now and then I would get back to the images I took from the Scientific Center, and trying to get away with the noise level in most of them if not all. It is like an arsenal for me now after I stopped working with pictures from Ireland for some time now. Of course, not much HDR there to be done in these images but with ProPhoto color space (which unfortunately do not adhere to lot of websites like Photobucket and MostPhotos), a set of vivid colors can be extracted, with the noise of course. RAW file processing sounds fine when it comes to colors and contrast (but not always), but noise-wise, it's never enough, specially with a noise level of ISO12800. For this reason, not all images were (to me) applicable to be submitted online, excluding MostPhotos of course where you can upload almost anything above 5MP in resolution.
Nevertheless, RAW files got some nice features beside the color-related options, like Clarity. Clarity is an option that partially controls the sharpness of the image. Control this option carefully and you can have an amazing effect to your image. Notice that the sharpness here is not like the sharpness that would be fixed by dedicated plugins or by the RAW editor itself, but it is simply controlling the outer edges generally. You can make a "dreamy" effect by reducing the Clarity to some specific amount (depending on the image of course). One of the amazing things I've encountered while "playing" with this option while working on my Scientific Center images was this one...

The dotted fish
still looking after its official name!

In this image, increasing the clarity did literally increase the size of the black dots on this fish (which I don't recognize its name yet!), while reducing the clarity, the black dots became smaller (with the dreamy effect a bit). I decided to reduce the size of the black dots here to not make it "bulky" looking.
With these images from the aquarium, even when HDR was possible, I consider checking the RAW files and try to get something out of them. HDR is well-known for producing grains in the images even with low ISO (and sometimes it is hard to clean later even with dedicated noise filters). The thing after all is, what is your mood? Worry about the noise later on...

Abyss (RAW)

Abyss (HDR)

In the previous two images for the aquarium in the Scientific Center, I was really fluctuating between the two. I like them both. I like the RAW version for its mysterious look, and I like the HDR version for its vivid and enriched colors (and pronouncing more the sun rays in water). Notice that this (bracketed) image was taken at ISO12800, thus despite the smooth look in a small version like this, in large format it really... sucks big time.

Let's leave photography at this point though. I got lot of images that I've prepared but I can't put them all in here at the moment, but maybe when I need to talk about some specific topic. Working with these photos made me lazy about my Ayvarith project now. I completely forgot about it! The last thing I did was to simply make the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story into the public (with sound examples only in the preface). On the other hand, I'm trying to dedicate some time to read this book I got last month and just started to read it, and typically, the only time I have is, at work (how ironic)!

The Playful Brain
reading on process!

The book is about solving puzzles to enhance various functions of the brain. Very interesting and amusing, and there are lot of practices or "training" to enhance various skills. So far, I'm still in the first part of the book which talks about Memory. There are some practices that I need to dedicate some time to do though, if I'm to be serious about my brain! Since when I was anyway? However, there is a nice website connected to this book: www.theplayfulbrain.com, which contains some amazing videos and news.
Time to post this for now, and have a moment of silence over the lovely cat that passed...

Indian Threadfish (Alectis indica). Local name: Udhaimy
عظيمي

Fortunati...

Had been a weird week sort of. Flew away so fast and, weird weather too. Just on Wednesday you would see the world in a yellowish cover from the dust and the visibility, I presume, was lesser than 500 meters (~1500 ft) if not lesser than 100 meters  (~300 ft) even! I had to go to work anyway but later on I've been told that the employees and admins left the place already! But I stayed until 1:00 p.m. (I finish at 2) and wow, wish if the streets are like that everyday, minus the dust of course.

Taken from my mobile that day, this short video just to show the dusty weather we had on Wednesday. 

Notice that the meteorology department says "we have fresh air"  (???)

Just when you don't take your camera with you and take videos or pictures wherever you go, all the opportunities seem to be showing up in your face wherever you go and you feel paralyzed. However, after this weather we had a "nice" weather back. Literally nice weather with 17°C (62.6F), like some sweet morning in November here. Our weather does not need a meteorologist, but a fortuneteller.

At home, I haven't been doing much, but only taking pictures of the seashells I've collected in the past few weeks, and working on my own project of "peeling" objects (those are shells from the time being). However, I've worked with some pictures from my visit to the Scientific Center a bit and worked on singular shots for my seashells as well.

Leopard Whipray

Unfortunately, those images from the Scientific Center that were taken at maximum ISO (12800) were so hard to clean and somehow were not so appealing. Even the dedicated profiles for Canon EOS 7D that were made ready for NeatImage at this ISO, were not enough to clean the noise. Mostly, they would clean the luminance grain noise, yet there is a hard-to-remove chrominance noise (color spots) that were desaturated a bit, but not removed completely. Beside, the image looks so soft with lot of details lost.

To over come the chrominance noise in this shark shot, which strangely were mostly concentrated on the outside of the shark's body, I've decided to turn everything into Black and White and keep and shark in color. ProPhoto space seem to push such noise type further and cause a problem for any filtration effort!

Nevertheless, there are some points even with ISO12800 where I worked out some HDR images just for fun. They are bad enough with all the noise, thus I didn't care much about how I tone-map them, so I worked less on giving a realistic look for such an image...

The Aquarium of the Scientific Center
People didn't like this image because of the effect or the high noise level, yet what I believe, noise level should not stop you from using your image in any way possible.

 On the shells side now, I've began using my new self-made turntable mounted on the base of the Manfrotto SPH303. Giving some trials still on how to achieve the peeling look for my shells; trying various shells for now. Unfortunately, the process is tiresome. My first trial was with a shell of highly irregular conical shape (unfortunately I don't have a picture at hand at the moment) that comes with spikes. The first trial was set on 20 degrees for each shot (and the lighting provided was on onside). Because of the spiral conical shape, seems that the peeling process (adding layers with layer masks; eliminating the unneeded parts) was going in a wrong way. Probably for such shapes the peeling must go in circles around the center and not sideways! However, I stopped working with this project and moved to taking pictures of single shells:

My current settings after moving from one side of the room (to my right here) to this position where I stuck Velcro on the wall and on the white board to ease putting on and removing. The desk lamp is used to eliminate the object from the top giving some hard shadow on the turntable but at this point it's not so important. With a macro lens and flash unit, and setting WB: tungsten or fluorescent to balance the hot yellow color of the flood light from the desk lamp, the background looks blue rather than white. Probably, I should stick the turntable to the white board next time.

Ringed shell. I wonder if these rings tell the age of the shell itself?

As you can see, I've been using the turntable itself as a stand post for such shots without using the softbox that I've made at home. The softbox makes soft shadows for your objects and you can surround it majorly with 4 light sources (sides, top and front) and it would give a nice white background. I don't mind the hard shadow here though since it's at the bottom of the object. I fix my objects standing like that with a little piece of children playing clay (maybe you can see a bit of it in the image above at the bottom right side under the shell).

One problem here as well, is the center of the circle which I have to appoint precisely. Common problem I've been facing now while rotating my object is having the object at offset from the center relative to the camera's lens. In macro shots, everything becomes so so sensitive! Too many things to take care for, and shots are better be taken with Live-View on (to avoid the mirror flipping and shaking the camera) and of course, a remote (wireless) is a must. 

Later, I've picked another small conical shell but not spiral this time, and more regular in shape (horizontal-wise at least), and this time I've set the base to rotate at 10 degrees instead of 20, which means 36 shots for a complete circle. Done this already (in RAW format) with flash unit and flood light on top, and it was a tiresome process as it is. The flash unit (580EX II) got tired of me and needed a change of battery (but I didn't change the battery as I preferred to wait longer for the recharge than change anything in the configuration). The process now is on the go and started it already, but as I said, it is a long process and a tiresome one, and the picture is not ready as I'm typing this. My panorama programs didn't help much in identifying the type of movement here so I have to do everything manually. With 36 shots for the whole body, minus the top and bottom), the transition of rotating shell was smoother (you can see that by moving through the images quickly and you will see the shell as if it is rotating), and also I've dedicated 18 shots to be "welded" on the right of the basic starting image, and 17 on its left, making the starting point in the center. Although the shots are in RAW (18MP) but I preferred to reduce the resolution and work with TIFF-16bit instead. It is slow already like that, so imagine working with 36 RAW files stacked as layers, as they are 18MP!!!

Ayvarith-wise now. I have to admit I was lazy and awkward toward this project but it was for the sake of working with my camera! Anyway, I've removed the "private" status from the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story in WDC. I was planning to remove this status when I add the vocal sample for a narration in Ayvarith for the whole set, but I think this can be done later, as the transliteration is almost ready and the preface is ready with vocal samples to show how some letters are pronounced. You can check it for yourself here. The Ayvarith transliteration is dedicated as a folder by itself. I'm trying to find some time to record the narration, but with this weather and these jams, my body has a swing of moods...

I'm going to post this now and get back to my Italian music session. It's nice to get away from the English a bit now and then...