Urú!

Well, I think I will delay my supposed vacation from blogging just a bit and will be posting this blog post, hopefully.
Meanwhile, we were supposed to get back to work partially with things going gradually in the fight with COVID-19. Suddenly, though, things started getting out of hands here and the number of hits is increasing by day as I'm typing these words in what seems to be a second wave. So, Phase I, which was supposed to be ending by June 21^st, is extended further to some unknown time till this moment. Who knows, maybe till the time of posting this, Phase II would in effect (and probably I'll be heading back to work).
Anyway, I was planning to post about a series of shots, which I'm going to call The King Series, but I think I will delay that for now in favor of the shots I've shot on June 21^st for the solar eclipse; My FIRST ever solar eclipse shooting!
However, I have to notify you in advance that this would be a rather short post (or maybe I should say a boring post) because shooting the eclipse was kind of "monotonous". Or in other words, no big deal about it; Nothing special!

Urú!

Sigma DG 70-300mm.

Just before I start, Urú actually means "eclipse" in Irish; Just so you know. Now, I really wished that I would have taken these shots within the framework of a landscape, but this was not possible (of course). Thus, I had to satisfy myself with what I can do at the moment. I Just picked my Sigma 70-300mm lens fitted with B+W 403 UV filter and Kenko's IR Cut filter, and my modified EOS 7D and headed out. I had an idea of using my Rokinon 800mm f/8 Mirror Lens, but abandoned the idea when I remembered the hurdles and hardships involving its focusing (manual) and also no filter would fit that (except for the solar filter maybe), but I really wanted to shoot in ultraviolet here to experience what the outcome would be. Not a big deal though, for sure, but still, it was an experiment to be done!

Rokinon 800mm Mirror Lens,
a.k.a. Barrel lens.

The solar eclipse started around 7:20 a.m. local time, so I was there with my tripod. The other unpleasant part about this eclipse is that it was partial only and not annular. Anyway, I guess I don't have the right to complain here since it's my first time to shoot a solar eclipse.

Triple Eclipse

Kenko's infrared cut filter,
to stop the infrared leakage in
the ultraviolet pass filter.

Now, the ultraviolet and IR cut filter did a good job in blocking the sun, in addition to the high f-number (but this one I was fluctuating between f/11-f/22) and the high shutter speed (settled down later to 8000^-1s). However, the first few shots were bright (too bright) as can be seen from Triple Eclipse. Also, this brightness showed the inner reflection problems (common when you stack filters on a lens), and for this we see here a triple image for the eclipse; One real image and inner reflections in between the filters and the lens. Can serve an artistic purpose but definitely not always.

Stages

As I've stated already, the shoot was a bit boring really: Shoot a series in burst mode, adjust the camera tilt, shoot again. The thing kept on and on. I was hoping though that I would get some details from the sun or its halo when I process the ultraviolet images but I think I did need an extra zoom here (I was shooting at 300mm of course). I wanted to use a teleconverter to shoot at 600mm but then I thought, well, it's my first time; I better shoot with what I'm sure that would work. Adding a teleconverter would reduce the amount of light significantly and adding an ultraviolet filter is not quite a friendly thing, since UV wavelengths are quite sensitive to the glass and are drastically reduced. All in all, it was a good idea to reduce the amount of glass through which the UV must pass. Anyway, the good thing after all is shooting different stages of the eclipse where the moon gradually covered more and more of the sun disk. So, I decided to merge some of these images all together in some artistic way and so it was Stages. Of course, this is not the real path of the sun in the sky; Things were harder in reality as I was following the sun at 300mm. The event started to get closer and closer to the zenith point and things started to get harder for me to look (I was covering my head and the camera's back with a towel). However, at the end, I've decided a video, just so I might do something with it. And I did!

Note: The music comes from Free Music Archive website, and titled Magic Hour by Three Chain Links - Hope I got it all right!

The original video was almost 8 minutes long. Around the end, I got a signal on LiveView warning me about sensor heating, and that's when the video ended as I had to switch the camera off, of course. Anyway, shooting was getting harder at that point as I said as the camera got almost pointing to the zenith.
The problem with the video is that it was not easy to deal with and correct the color shift. I had to process the video several times to make it smaller in size to be dealt with and correct the color using "traditional" approaches (I've edited the video in Photoshop to correct the color in fact), and used OpenShot Video Editor to speed up the video. For some reason this one kept on crashing when I wanted to add the audio track so I had to close it down and head to the traditional Windows Movie Maker to add the audio. Such a mess. This said, I'm not really planning to venture into the world of video yet. Maybe never. Still, this is not the first time I do shoot a video with such filters and correct the colors, I just wish that correcting the White Balance for videos was easier than it is, just like the case with RAW files.

Finale

Well, after this little post about the past solar eclipse, I'm thinking seriously about giving myself a bit of a vacation from blogging for the time being, even though there is indeed some "good" material to post and discuss as I've mentioned before; The King Series, which sadly seems to have been abruptly stopped at the moment. Meanwhile, and for this short vacation from blogging (which I think would be around 2-3 weeks), there is much thinking to be done, and try. Just a side note, I've downloaded GIMP lately and I'm tinkering with it to see how I would adapt to this editor.

In case you don't know what GIMP is, it is a free opensource editor. And like how RawTherapee is somewhat a mimic for Adobe's Lightroom, GIMP is the mimic for Photoshop.

My initial trial with it leaves so much to be desired though it has some sparkle about it and things that got me interested to try out, but first things first and there are some essentials that I need to get around with, like how to edit a RAW file and changing the workspace color (it's dark gray which is not suitable for judging colors). I'm digging still through this and for sure I would need to be going through a lot of Help files and topics.
Beside all this technical mess, there are also some issues I'm working on but maybe it's not a good idea to talk about them right now as I'm actually unaware of the "end" of these issues and whether they are going to lead where I want it to be or not, but it is something that I better work on slow for now, and when the time comes, I'll talk about it in this blog, maybe.
And as with the ongoing crisis and home quarantine, which is more or less active despite the gradual opening and going back to normalcy, I've realized the fact that the hardest thing about isolation is not being isolate or alone at all, but hardships lie in being forced to be with others. I believe this is exactly the real problem with jails and imprisonment; Not confinement itself, but being with others and bearing with them, specially if a person does not get along with much of them.
Despite the lengthy period of time spent at home and not going to work, despite all of that, I still feel the need to get a vacation as if I'm not ready yet to get back to work. As I'm typing these words it has been confirmed that I should go back for one week at least starting from July 5^th to supervise some cleaning and disinfection work, and probably check on some devices. For such a little task under such circumstances, I still do feel not ready for the whole thing as if I didn't take a vacation for months. Which is true in some sense because the months in which I've stopped going to work were mostly spent at home coping and fighting against mood swings… severe mood swings. Maybe this whole thing is a signal that I need to find something, change jobs or resign, or anything. An idea that I had since long time but never been able to step it up further because, simply, there is not much to do out there for people like me. On the other hand, there are even more pressing matters that I deem more important than work and its situation which do require more attention from my side, and yet, they are just afloat without any real vision nor a solution in the near future. These matters are more or less related to the fact of how am I supposed to enjoy life for real, away from the network of mood swings and depression, and re-discovering what love is, in a time when I'm approaching 40 already… if love still exists, that is.

Ave…

The weather is getting colder here, as well as my heart along the way I presume. It would have been such good news and feeling, if not for the passing of a dear online friend that suffered from a long battle against diabetes. Though we never met really, but we still shared all the jokes and laughter together and she was quite fond of my photos. She dreamed that one day we might meet up in Ireland and even do some photography in front of her. She made me feel as if my photos from Ireland made her re-discover her homeland; As if she was not Irish already, living her final days in the US.

Rest In Peace, Paula Doak

Mearcair

Last week the news were out about a transit of Mercury over the disk of the sun. Not a rare event but it definitely is not the average event that would happen every year. I think the next transit for Mercury of this sort might take place in 2032 or sometime around that if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not sure even if it would still be visible in the sky here. Rarely even more than Mercury, are Venus transits. I think the next transit won't be happening in my life time at all!
Anyway, the adventure was set on Tuesday. I had a very limited time to prepare for the shoot as the transit would occur only at about 3:30 p.m. local time, and then in about one hour the sunset would officially start. To gain some time, I've actually prepared my gear the day before and made everything ready, so all I had to do is pick up the gear and head to the roof of my house. I still had some fears back then that some objects would block the view as the sun goes down in the sky but luckily none of that happened. So, in a nutshell, my gear was composed of:

• My modified Canon EOS 7D.
• Solar filter.
• Rokinon 800mm Mirror Lens (fixed at f/8).
• Flexible cable (will explain why below).
• Cable remote.
• Tripod of course, with ball head for easy and quick movement.

I had to refer back to my old tripod which I didn't use quite a while mainly because it extends quite high compared to my other most-used tripod, without needing to raise the central column or the neck.

The gear I used and you can see the cable around the mirror lens,
while the clips hold the solar filter over the lens front.
The shot was out of focus because the flies were really, really, really annoying.
Yes, that much annoying that I couldn't focus properly with my phone.

I was reluctant to use my old mirror lens with its cumbersome control mechanism; Just a complete manual lens with a primitive telescopic design crammed in a small volume. However, knowing that Mercury will be such a small dot over the sun disk, I've realized (and I've done my own research as well) that I do need a very long focal length, and here I had two choices. Either:

1. Use my Sigma 70-300mm with teleconverters, OR,
2. Use my Rokinon 800mm Mirror Lens.

Rokinon 800mm Mirror Lens f/8

Comparing the two, the scale tilts towards the Mirror Lens further. Because using teleconverters would reduce the light quality further (beside using a solar filter here) and this might not be such a good idea and the overall size of the whole lens/teleconverter combination would be too long and I'm sure it would give me some hard time in movement (specially with my external telephoto lens sleeve which is not quite as flexible as a regular sleeve on a real telephoto lens). Adding one teleconverter to my Sigma lens at 300mm would extend the focal length to 600mm. Adding another one would make this jump to 1200mm. Juicy! However, my previous experiences in shooting the sun with such a long focal length were quite cumbersome specially when it comes to moving tiny amounts of degrees to follow the sun (remember: the more you zoom in, the faster the celestial body will virtually move). So, imagine here that I'm jumping to 800mm with a single lens only and without much light quality loss; As simple as that.
Now, we come to the story of the cable. Since the focusing with such long focal length and cumbersome mechanism would prove to be a challenge, I got myself these multi-purpose bending cables or wires long time ago solely for this purpose; To wrap them around the focusing ring of the mirror lens and use it as a level to move the focusing ring gently. It didn't stop the shake though but it was quite useful nevertheless.

Mercury, after processing the image (cropped).
The lower right line is just some dirt.

Anyway, my main aim was to shoot a series of shots of Mercury crossing the sun disk but unfortunately after one hour of shooting or so, I just got plenty of images with the position of Mercury almost not moving. After being attacked by flies and sweating waterfalls I had to get inside and stop the whole thing (at that point it was past 4 p.m., and still didn't have lunch then!). So, technically, despite the many many images I've shot, I didn't quite get a serial sequence after all. Probably one of the mistakes that I've committed here is that I've focus on the sun (by checking the edges of the circle on LiveView of course) thinking that because of the great distance between Earth and the sun, Mercury would virtually be in focus as well. This seems to be not the case here though! When I've edited the images, Mercury was not quite that sharp dot on the disk of the sun, but more like a blot of ink!

100% Crop of one of the images. Mercury is the small black dot,
which I think it could have been more in focus. In some images, Mercury
completely disappears.
(click to enlarge)

What amazed though is the presence of dirt and other artifacts. I thought first that those are only on the solar filter from the outside but it turned out to be they are sensor artifacts. This is despite cleaning the gear (lens and camera) the day before and making sure all are clean (and using the loupe to check the sensor specifically). I'm not sure how this got in, but definitely I need to check and clean it later. Didn't have time to do so yet.
At this point, my little "silly" adventure with Mercury transit was over and I'm still checking the images Ivé shot (counted more than 2400 images) to see if I can do anything artistic about them! We'll see.

Finale

The departure of a friend, an online friend, is not in any way less drastic than a real physical friend's departure; Whether met or not. This departure was sudden to me, because she was supposed to be coping well with her new condition after amputating one of her legs because of some blood problems. Such a drastic and sudden change of events.
All these feelings actually are pushing me to write emotionally from the first moment I've heard the news, and typing an eulogy on her feed on Facebook. Now, I feel the urge and the necessity to really focus to write one poem at least for her sake.
All these ideas seem to clash now in my head though. I do have other tasks and other ideas of photography that I want to work on. One might consider typing or writing a poem is easy but that's not really the case at all. It needs dedication and time, and foremost, an immersion into your own feelings. Now my feelings are there hovering in the air as well as my words, but I have to turn my mind into a lens to focus these into proper and rhyming words on paper (or monitor that is). Goodbye Paula. May we see each other one more time, in peace…

AstroFails - Reflections…

It has been a semi-idle week. I had many hopes but they were crushed down; Regarding astrophotography that is. However, I might keep trying after a while, but right now I need to focus more on some ideas I'm trying to achieve and do for a while but I was simply lazy to do. What I liked about my trials with astrophotography is the fact that I can do it at home just in the yard and I can have a decent time alone even when everyone is inside the house. Reminds me of that time when I used to climb up to the highest point on the roof just to shoot the cityscape of my area from there or do time lapses for the sunset. Unfortunately though for me now, I can't go to the roof, and in the yard, my field of vision for the sky is limited by the surrounding houses which somehow limits my good view to the zenith above me alone. But that's another story anyway. Yet, I will post here some of my failures with astrophotography, which is still under studying and learning processes.
Before heading to my failures in astrophotography, I'd just like to list here my results certificate from Treierenberg Circuit, which was emailed to me on April 19^th. I wouldn't call it a success, nor a complete failure, but I was hoping for more brilliants results than this actually.

A=Accepted, R=Rejected (for exhibition).
Click to enlarge.

 First of all, if you have OCD please don't look at the list because I didn't have the time to organize it with my copy/paste process! It bothers me as well but I have to do with this right now. As you can see from the list, lot of images were rejected (and some of them were kind of unexpectedly rejected). However, I'm happy that my first time with "Series" photography, entitled Syrian Girl, was accepted; All five images. This series was shot some time ago (I think in 2017) for a project with the group which I was a member in back then, and it was not really dedicated to the topic of a Syrian girl at all, but was more general about how a girl would remain a girl even in adulthood. But somehow the meaning can be twisted as well to reflect the status of a girl, who lost her parents in war.
Anyway, no gold medals this time, but I'm happy that my shot Anxiety got accepted. I can't post all images here but probably you can roll back to my previous posts where I posted some of these images (and I made a quick video as well for one of the posts).

AstroFails

As I've mentioned earlier, my trials with astrophotography from the yard at home were prone to fail mostly and I couldn't catch but a glimpse of some constellations or stars. My real target, though, is to shoot something exciting like a nebula or a galaxy.
In the course of learning, I had my hopes up for various reasons, as well as learning many other aspects that might be beneficial for the photographic vision and processing as a whole later on. Specifically, the power of RawTherapee! I still have my hopes high despite the failures that I've had already. I've read and still reading from time to time about the trials of many people in shooting high ISO and in the city bringing the space to life with their images, without even using a tracking mount which typical for a serious professional astrophogoraphy, Despite following their steps, I didn't come up with anything serious though and I guess it's all laid on my own problems with the location and gear.

A trial with 50mm lens on April 21^st. Probably Leo constellation appears here.
The black spots are probably passing clouds or just stacking artifacts.

So far, I didn't exceed the limits of shooting constellations only, even with the range of 300mm, which I've read in some pages that it is fine for astrophotography. The downside though of using my 300mm lens (Sigma's) is the small diameter compared to more professional photo lenses (62mm) and the high f-number (f/5.6 @300mm) which limits the passage of light (specially faint beams) even while shooting in high ISO. Using my Rokinon mirror lens is of course out question here (but I tried it anyway!); The lens if 800mm but with a fixed aperture of f/8. A catastrophe even with high ISO. But I like to imagine how the situation would be if I would be using a tracker with this lens? Then I would be able to shoot for a longer time and would for sure collect more data and more light!

Trial at 100mm on April 23^rd with Hα filter. Unfortunately,
I couldn't work out what constellations are present here. I've spent hours trying to check
star maps! If you can help, please feel free to comment below.

My trials in the beginning were always at 300mm with Hα filter to suppress the light pollution. However, reading more about the topic, I've realized that most professionals would shoot normal, without such a filter, even in untracked astrophotography like what I'm doing right here, and shoot Hα to collect more data in that region of the spectrum and merge it with the normal images. It's easy to be done digitally, complicated to be done in practice! However, I've shot with the filter and processed some images and some of them yielded some good results with Deep Sky Stacker (DSS). Seeing how things are hard with 300mm, I've decided to go all the way to the beginning; Shooting with 50mm, then 100mm and then maybe 200mm and 300mm. My trials are still going on while typing these words actually but I've stopped for some time to do other photography projects on the side!
This experience in shooting astrophotography, despite its failures, as I think, did teach a number of things and opened my eyes to another venue. I like to organize my thoughts in points here:

• Shooting with high ISO: I'm not afraid to crank the ISO to its highest point. Not only in astrophotography but it could be in other genres as well. A number of things had changed when it comes to dealing with such images and such noise.
• RawTherapee: It turns out, beside DSS, that this open source editor would be (and is) the best friend one can have away from Photoshop! The noise reduction algorithms and the capabilities of adding a dark frame and a flat frame to the algorithm of noise reduction and image correction makes it ideal. This is beside the "demosaicing" algorithms, of which two are dedicated to high ISO images. I'm thinking seriously of visiting some of the old images I've taken (specially those from 2015 from the Monodrama festival back then) and try to reduce the noise with RawTherapee. Some professionals, as I've read in some articles, make a point that it's bad that RawTherapee does not allow the addition of more than one dark frame to take the average for noise reduction (like DSS does) but I think this is something specific to DSS and the nature of astrophotography, and RawTherapee is a general editor of some sort and should not necessarily go on the same path as DSS. Another good point for RawTherapee is the ability to work with 32-bit images as well (HDRs), and in various algorithms as it seems (linear and rational).
• Ball Heads: I never imagined that my worst enemy in shooting would one day be my best friend in shooting! When I started my trials with astrophotography, I used a panning head; My preferred head to work with ease. I've neglected all the advice I've read about using ball heads in those online articles from professionals. I was wrong, completely. Ball heads in this situation IS the real and the only candidate for shooting the sky. Thinking about it, I might even consider integrating such a head in my usual workflow (but not in panorama making for sure of course).

Probably these are the major points that changed or added to my knowledge about photography and my usual workflow in processing images after shooting. At this time, I'm still trying to cope and enhance my practical workflow when shooting the sky but I have to admit that I didn't achieve much progress in that arena. Here are some of the problems that I'm still trying to find solutions to:

• Focusing: Having a good focus to a completely dark sky with unseen stars (until the images are processed) is quite a struggle. I've been even taking test shots just to notice and see if there are any bright stars in the image and move the focusing ring accordingly. Reading articles online about this matter did not help much, and applying the principle of the hyperfocal distance is not achievable somewhat (specially when the f-number is quite low). Probably the most significant advice I've seen online is to focus at some light source or a subject which is around 100m away or so, and that is not possible to do in my case (I don't have such a space as I'm shooting at home).
• Locating: Currently, I've been using an app on my Huawei android phone called Sky Map, and probably this is the best I could find. The app is fine, but the problem is in matching the field of view on the phone with that of the lens (i.e. what does the lens see). The lens' field of view is a measurable angle (according to the sensor size), but on the app there is no scale for that. I tried to check for a better app but seems this is the best I could get so far. 
• Pointing: With the problem of locating, comes the other problem of pointing in the right direction into the dark sky. A cumbersome method I've came up with is to hold my phone against the LCD of my camera (as if it is the LCD itself) and look at the map on the phone to know what stars are in view. This is not an accurate method of course but maybe a good approximation. Moving the camera cannot be done while holding the phone against the LCD, unless with some help (but I'm working alone here, as usual).
• Tracking: The method of "untracked astrophotography" depends on moving the camera manually and follow up the movement of the object in the sky. But the sky is dark already and I'm not sure how would I follow up an object that cannot be seen even on LCD when the shots are taken! For this, I depend on some visible clues like a glittering little star and check its movement before changing the orientation of the camera. However, maybe this star is not anywhere near my original aim in the sky!
• Gear: Not talking about a tracker mount (which is favorable actually), but a good lens would do wonders. In the images above, shot at 50mm and 100mm, all were actually taken with my Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens, with just the addition of a 2x teleconverter to reach 100mm (and adding another one to reach 200mm even). Teleconverters double the focal lengths AND the aperture. Thus, f/1.4 would naturally go up to f/2.8 (and surprisingly stops at this value even when adding another teleconverter). Most of the articles I've read online talk about Canon's 70-200mm lenses with f/2.8 and adding a teleconverter to that to reach 400mm to shoot nebulae and galaxies. Makes me really wonder whether my Sigma 70-300mm is any good to the task with its f/4 at 70mm and f/5.6 at 300mm (and adding a teleconverter would raise that up to f/11 at 600mm!). Baseline: f/4 is not good enough. But anyway, I'm willing to try my best still with what I have.

Those are, probably, the most dominant problems in my work with the sky so far. I'm willing to try and try again. For the time being, I'm just having a break to type this blog post and also to work on side projects (which, again, starts with chasing my gear around and locating lost items). I was hoping though to get some decent results for a galaxy or a nebula, and start typing an Arabic blog post about my experience with it. Guess this has to wait till I get concrete results. I am aiming also to take wide angle shots and try to catch the milky way in such light-polluted area, so I might leave the comfort of my home or try to reach the roof. We'll see about that.

Finale

Summer is arriving here and the weather is getting hotter and hotter. It's such a mess in my workplace right now, and such a mess in my brain right now. The idea of just resigning and leaving everything behind me really tickles my brain from time to time. I really need some kind of eternal rest, from useless routines and work, and people as well. Is that a result of not traveling for such a long time? Maybe. Not sure if I will travel this year though despite having some ideas already. The laws here, also, are getting up to some ridiculous degree, and around me I see many people and instances of people trying to survive in this turmoil of a thing that is supposed to be a homeland.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at my poetry writing and I feel sorry for myself for not being able to write down anything or do anything about it for months now. It feels if my soul, rather than my body, that is so tired deep inside. Tired of everything. Tired of even pinning a smile on my face wherever I go and keeping my cool temper. All that is blocking my way of expression, verbally, and in writing. All I'm wishing for right now is to have the mood and power to work with my camera as much as possible and trying to put my mind off the problems that hover around me…

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?

Post-Ramadhan…

Ramadhan has passed, and so did Eid (The Feast), and now I'm back to my normal pace. Well, almost. If you can call my life normal anyway.

As much as it was idle, I had the chance to do some experiments during Ramadhan, and the majority of my work with photography was actually visiting old photos and doing effects or re-working panoramas I've done in the past (mainly from Malta). All this experimenting did actually trigger me to place an order, which I will explain later.

An Ghrian

An Ghrian, the sun, in Irish. I did try to take shots for the sun before (and almost got my sensor fried too!). However, this time it's a bit different, with my converted Canon EOS 7D and an ultraviolet-pass filter. Though I did some trials using my Rokinon mirror lens which I didn't use much, but most of my trials were done with my Sigma 70-300mm plus two teleconverters (yielding a total of 1200mm in focal length). Not only controlling the Sigma lens is relatively easily in terms of focusing (a must-be manual), but also most of my filters (ND, IR, and UV) are circular filters that fit the Sigma lens only (with a step-down ring). As for Rokinon's mirror lens, and despite the great zooming that could be achieved, the fact that filters can hardly be used here made it a dangerous tool and hard to control.

The sun shot with a stack of 4 filters.
Story about it here.

In the process of capturing better images for the sun (and the moon), I came into the swirl of the world of filters and not only for lenses, but also for telescopes and eyepieces, as I was looking for ways to get the desired look (scientifically) and checking probability for finding what I need in other categories; but without the need to get a telescope either.

Taken in UV filter.
The set can be found
in my stream.

In the process of learning more about the world of filters in relation to shooting the sun and astrophotography in general, I've encountered the sad fact that my B+W Black 403 UV Pass filter is not a pure UV Pass filter, but it does leak some great amount of IR. Hence, probably many images I've taken before using this filter specifically were actually formed by IR beams and not by UV spectrum specifically. Nevertheless, some of these were good, and weather in IR or UV, I was able to show some surface features for the sun, even though the usual filter used for such detail is the H-α filter (another filter on my wishlist). After researching a bit further for some way to enhance the performance of my UV-pass filter, I've found out that the only way to do this is by attaching a hot-mirror filter or NIR-cut filter (Near InfraRed). I'll talk about them a bit later, as it seems I couldn't get exactly what I wanted.

Beside the mess, I'm considering seriously to get some 30.5mm filters for the rear of my mirror lens, but that should be on hold for some time now since more important issues must be dealt with.

1200mm, f/128, 0.8s, ISO100.
Using UV-pass filter.
The dot on the sun is Venus.
June 17^th, 2016.

Re-Work

During Ramadhan, the majority of work was actually re-working or editing my old panoramas and applying some techniques or effects on them (e.g. watercolor effect). The majority of this work is just to post these images on Instagram later on though. However, I was able to mingle a bit with some older panoramas to discover some new projections that I've never done before to them.

Qalaoid

Gruama

In fact, my work also included some old shots from 2013, like Gruama, which was shot using my then-new infrared-pass filter. It was just a re-process in some different way since I was not experienced back then with such filters (and it was taken with a regular camera). Back then I didn't appreciate the effect much but now I realize that my B+W infrared pass filter with threshold of about 650nm is in fact pretty useful for artistic uses. Increasing the threshold for infrared filters will approach photography more into the realm of monochrome rather than being colored infrared with the typical vivid and pleasant strange color cast. Kodak's gel filter which I usually use with my fisheye lenses has a threshold of 1000nm, and thus chances for producing vivid colors even with my converted camera is next to null; shots are always monochromatic, in between red and blue tints, as can be seen in Dawwar tal Qaddis and Planeta InfraĠużeppi.

Planeta InfraĠużeppi

Dawwar tal Qaddis

Toys

 Now to the fun part: new order placed and excitation in the air! Though I wished that I could expand the list of my items this time but all is placed in the wishlist waiting. I have a budget I'm trying not to exceed, and yet I'm trying to educate myself further in terms of filters and some aspects of astrophotography.

Source: B&H.

As I'm limited in terms of the budget, I've tried to limit myself to the very essential items, like this one: CamRanger MP-360 Motorized Pan/Tilt Tripod Head. This tripod head must be one of the MOST wanted items in my list since I'm having hard time controlling my lens when it is zoomed in (specially when it comes to shooting the sun or the moon). Tripod heads available for me now are just impractical, since at large magnification values for objects like the sun or the moon, the object would look to travel faster than it would appear to the naked eye, and I would have to adjust the knobs for the tripod head after each shot to follow up. This head should and is supposed to solve such problem quite easily by controlling the orientation by a cable remote.

Source: B&H.

One of the major items and one of which I've been hesitant to order is the Tiffen 58mm Standard Hot Mirror Filter. The idea was primary about using this filter to aid my UV-pass filter and stop the IR leakage in it. However, checking the transmission curves provided, things would seem shaky with this filter because it does block spectrum in the range of UV as well. Roaming the net around, I've learned more and I've experienced more on how to read transmission charts, but unfortunately, no perfect match for my need was found. Few filters were found with quite narrow band passage allowance in the UV, but the corresponding websites looked weird a bit and I couldn't even place an order! Anyway, if this filter didn't work well with my UV-pass filter, I'm planning to use it normally and directly with my lenses, since it helps on clearing the image and increase its sharpness as I read in some articles; so in essence, it has a clearing factor just like what UVC (Haze, or UV-cut) filters do, but in a different region of the spectrum. However, this is not the end of the story with filter, as the lens itself play a major part in UV Photography, because modern lenses are usually multi-coated for UV protection, and seems older lenses are more appropriate for the task!

Kylemore Abbey

Coming to mention UV-cut filters, I've noticed some bluish streak in the panorama done for Kylemore Abbey in 2014. Even though the panorama is tone-mapped from HDR, yet such bluish haze (in the mountains) might not be removed with HDR technique and would require UV-cut filter indeed. For this reason, I've started to look for gel (or polyster or resin) UV filter to be used specifically with my fisheye lenses. Ironically, I barely used my circular 58mm UV-cut filter!

Source: B&H

Another critical item which I've been postponing its purchase is the ring flash for macro photography. Since I don't delve deeper on a professional level with macro photography, I've thought that such professional ring flashes like Canon's are way too expensive for my simple use. Thus, I've decided to head to something more simple and cheap for occasional usage: Bolt VM-110 LED Macro Ring Light. It comes with various adapters for various diameters, and it uses LED instead of a flash tube. Moreover, this ring flash is universal and doesn't depend on TTL system, thus it works with any DSLR almost as the description reads. Some people would strongly recommend using TTL systems but I'm quite used by now on using manual modes in regular speedlites. Thus, handling this item should not be a problem supposedly.

Beside these major items, I've ordered some cheap infrared polyester filters and other stuff which I might talk about later. Also on the way but from another resource, some Baader filter sheet (or solar filter) to be cut and shaped freely for shooting the sun, and a book about Sumerians (been my fascination for some time). I can somehow consider this to be my own birthday gift to myself, but a bit early.

Finale

Up till this moment, my life is undergoing a storm, despite the calm appearance from the outside. Let's not delve into these matters of the heart for now. All I can say for now is I'm urging these new toys to arrive, as soon as possible, to get me started playing around. I need to put my worries onto something; the sooner the better…
 

Inert...

Another week is passing here with a dormant activity on almost all levels of my life. I'm not sure what is it really, it is just that deep feeling of tiring mind and body. Despite my trial to do some photography but I failed with an honorary degree. Maybe I will talk about that later.
My niece is out of the hospital now. According to the doctors, it seems that she was inflicted with the herpes virus, and probably her teeth are suspected for such low immunity (adding the effects of thalassemia) to the virus and enabling the virus to the reach the circulatory system that easily and up to the brain. Thank God she is fine by now, even though with a dozen of medicines and antibiotics. Just to imagine such a little girl is suffering all of that at such an age makes me hate my life already.

Well, let's see what I've done in the past 2 weeks, if there is anything that I could have done better anyway...

Astro

After getting my Rokinon mirror lens, I didn't have much chances in the past weeks to try it well, but I did enough to see its effect on lunar and solar photography. The solar part, in particular, was a cumbersome experiment which I will talk about in a while.

100% Crop
Rokinon mirror lens (800mm) + 2 x2 teleconverters, f/32, 100^-1sec, ISO800.

The first real trial for the lens was directed to the moon. since I got the lens, the moon persisted on not showing up in the sky; if it is there then it's cloudy, or simply the setting time is prior to sunset itself. Anyway, let's not blabber about the "good" luck I've been experimenting this lately. I've finally captured the moon here and it's shaky as you can see above because of the great focal length (3200mm in total), and the wind was persisting that night. The crop above is a portion of the image which is not resized.

Sonne IX
Rokinon mirror lens (800mm) + 2 x2 teleconverters, f/32, 8000^-1sec, ISO100.

The next test was aimed, of course, towards the sun. In fact, the sun was the main inspiration to get such a lens after all! However, you might have noticed that the ISO was relatively high in the moon's shot and it is low in the sun's shot, naturally because of the light level difference between the two. Ironically though, the sun's shot, to me, was harder to achieve for a number of reasons:

• Sun's position in the sky which forced me almost to raise the camera at 90^o.
• Facing the sun and not being able to cover the camera with

LensCoat as I did with previous shots. The LensCoat is useful to cover my head as well while working with the camera's LCD, giving me shelter against the harsh sunlight. The diameter of the mirror lens and the fact that the camera was placed on Manfrotto telephoto lens support made it impossible to cover the system with LensCoat.

Cokin's adapter ring (105mm) is bent (!) and could loosely attach to the front of the mirror lens.

Focusing with the green welding glass proved cumbersome (it doesn't give a sharp focus after all) thus I had to try placing ND gel filters sheets in front of the lens (as Cokin's square ND filters are smaller than the diameter of the lens). This highly affected the quality of the light and increased the cumbersomeness of the movement of the camera and lens (specially with some wind blowing).

Despite the stack of ND gel filters, I still had to use the fastest shutter speed (8000^-1sec)  for my camera and still it would be somehow a bright image.

Source: B&H

I've used around 11-stop of ND filters in my sun shot. Surprisingly, the shot became desaturated. The blue color of Sonne IX might be typical for images processed from IR shots done before (by swapping channels) but in this instance all I had to do is increase the vibrance (and no channel swapping is involved). In the first instance the image was almost greyscale in appearance. I was thinking for some time about using the gel filters for general long exposure shots with other lenses instead of the Cokin square ND filters because staking Cokin's would yield a magenta tint to the image, and here with gel filters it did give an unexpected result. However, desaturation is way better than a magenta tint, from my perspective at least.
The cumbersome situation with the filters made me rethink about the so-called Rear Filters which are supposedly fitting for T-mount lenses like this mirror lens. On the other hand, there is some hope in developing some way to fit gel filters easily into such a system by placing the filters on the rear end of the teleconverters instead of the rear of the mirror lens. However, this needs some revision as the structure of the teleconverter's rear is tricky a bit. Also one of the things that I need to work with is to innovate some way to focus this lens without touching intimately to reduce the shape as much as possible. For the time being, I might be using some rubber bands and clips!

100% Crop of the sunspot.

Now back to Sonne IX which surprised me with the existence of two sunspots (each spot is composed in a pair of poles in fact, meaning they appear as 4 dots). On the smaller version, the focus sounded fine, but of course as we approach in to view the 100% or the real size of the image we can see that the focus is not sharp enough. That's good enough though. Previously, using my Sigma and two x2 teleconverters (yielding 1200mm), the sun would appear as one big disk in the frame. Now, however, using a mirror lens with the same teleconverters, a quarter of the sun fills the frame, giving a good zooming in for the sunspots at hand. The crop you see here is for the sunspot at 5 o'clock in Sonne IX above.

Nox

I've been trying hard in the past 2 weeks to push it further with my night photography. However, the exhaustion and the lack of interest in most of the locations available made me almost idle. Now, in the coming few days, I have to work as much as possible and as fast as possible because winter is vanishing, though slowly. After all, I've somehow succeeded in only one shot which took me some time around 45 minutes to do.

Ad Borea
Rokinon 8mm fisheye, f/8, ISO100.

The location is an old one in fact. I've previously took a shot in this location, with the same lens, and also in one winter night. The difference here is the shot was taken under the roof of the structure (gazebo?) rather than away from it. Also, Ad Borea is in fact a tone-mapped image from a HDR slide. The sequence of the shots was started at 16 minutes exposure and ending at 30 seconds, which one stop difference between successive shots.
One of the embarrassing moments is to discover, after returning back home and uploading the images to the PC, that there was some trash on the left side that the darkness made it hard to see back then. I had to spend some significant time trying to manipulate the image (after tone-mapping) just to remove the trash from the scene. At the end, the only plausible solution I had in mind is to copy the table from the right side and fit it on the left!
Now this location can be inspiring for some panorama work but I need to check my options first in that location.

Failure

I had some ideas sketched down on pieces of paper. Unfortunately for me, all of them do involve some portraiture work. Since I don't have a model, I have to try it all on myself. Of course, this is not an easy task, to be a model and a photographer for yourself in the same time (in fact it is never advised to be so). My room is in clutter; with all the gear splashing in the place. I've tried for several days to catch a decent portrait, but my trials were to no avail on both fronts; posing and lighting. Guess my face is simply not photogenic and doesn't encourage on more creativity with the light! I've decided for the time being to just abandon these ideas and keep on going with something else. Portraiture is a nightmare.

Finale

With the lack of books in the current time, I'm trying to spend time (specifically at work) reading off Wikipedia, which is not a good source of information but it would do the job for general knowledge I'd say.
On the group's front, we are now in the phase of sorting out images to enroll in Austria's international photography contest and I've been given the responsibilities of uploading the photos as in the last year. Not sure how much I will get involved with the group for the time being, but surely I have to be careful in this field. Otherwise, I would slip into a twirl of responsibilities loads beside caring for Mom and the house, and my own projects with my camera and other things (Geltani specifically). Sometimes, I do think that I don't need a vacation from home and work only, but even away from my own camera.

My work is passing through some upheaval in the current time; we don't really know what is going on with the administrative body of the college. Things seem to be in chaos, and more suffering for us, the scientific staff in this place. Day by day, I feel the screws are getting loose on my nerves and I might explode at any moment, with any one. My worries are even extending further on the home front, with some family members being into some hard times (other than my niece).

I have to say that I'm literally losing my faith in everyone around me. I firmly believe that no one out there would really help me with anything, however simple may it be; I have to take things on my own and with my own hands; always. "Don't I deserve some love?" had become a stabilized bell-ringing question in my head at all times.