Mente Turbata in Mosque Magnam...

What the hell was going on with me in the past two weeks is something I wouldn't understand, ever. Stress, fatigue, injuries and finally, personal issues; feels like being dead and alive in the same time. Ah well, what's the difference after all... wasn't it like that most of the time?
I feel like nothing is left for me now except of my camera. I guess I will put it beside me on bed and hug it instead of getting a teddy bear myself. I spent this week somehow trying to test and use my new toy, the 8mm Rokinon fisheye lens and trying to adapt it to my panorama workflow.
For the time being, I'm still not so sure that I will adapt this new lens for my workflow. It is a double-edged sword. In the same time that it lowers down the number of shots and effort (and time), but on the other hand, in the same time, it reduces the resolution drastically. Although my usual size for panoramas ranges between 8,000-10,000 pixels in width, but with Canon's 15mm fisheye lens you would have the choice to expand beyond up to 20,000 pixels in width, while with Rokinon's 8mm fisheye, you are limited to 13,000. The depth of field and the sharpness are still under the scope for more testing. Setting the VR-head with Rokinon's 8mm was also a struggle and it pronounced the tripod legs and the VR-head itself more often and makes it pronounced more; talk about hardships in removing them. I need to try more and see if I can get comfortable with this for real.

Test image with Rokinon's 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens. Mom didn't like to move so I blurred her!

I didn't care much about tone-mapping the HDR here. I just had the urge to play around. Not an image for the stocks after all. As you can see, such shot would require maybe 2 or 3 (and maybe more a bit) with Canon's 15mm fisheye lens, but here it's all taken with one shot. Well, 3 bracketed for HDR processing of course. The tripod was elevated to around 2 meters high.

My joy in the past week was with some shots taken here and there with my photography class. I had to work in a haste little bit to prepare the images for this post. It was so much of a headache to work on these photos specially now, on Wednesday, after a really sick long day.
Anyway, our class went first to Al-Babtain's Library for Arabic Poetry (Let's call it BLAP for now). On Tuesday however, and unexpectedly, I got a phone call almost one hour before I leave work saying that we have a session today with the class in The Grand Mosque; a great mosque in the capital and beside BLAP building. It was a real hassle, as my tools were at home because I thought we won't go to a second location after BLAP. It was an exhaustive day.

I. BLAP:

BLAP was an interesting place, not for its construction only, but also because it is the first time I hear of it. The interior design was nice but unfortunately I went there without my VR-head. The architecture in the place is generally modern-type, but maybe with bits (only tiny bits) of antique-like structures, like the pillars for example.

Columnae

The pillars here were outside and on the side of the main "yard" if I should say. It is a bit like an open corridor. This shot was my first in that session (and here you see the tone-mapped HDR, but the RAW is also good). To take this shot I've spent almost 5 to 10 minutes trying to adjust my tripod and the tripod head (Velbon panhead) to make the perfect center. However, seems after all it is still inclined a bit (or is it an illusion?). I've having some hard time with keeping things straight (specially when it comes to panorama making). At such moments it would be useful to have a tripod with central lock like I used to have before, but on the other hand you lose some flexibility after all. My current tripod is nice, but also can be light that you might knock it off and shake it before you put the camera. Talk about clumsy movements; welcome to the story of my life.
The occasion was also a good one to give my new Rokinon 8mm another trial. In fact, I'm less impressed for the time being in putting this lens into my panorama workflow, but nevertheless, it gives some really nice shots in singles. I have my own doubts about the claimed sharpness though; could it be I'm doing something wrong?

Reading Hall
Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens

One thing was for sure though; a simple tilt in the center means a severely tilted image as a whole. This is true with this fisheye lens. Although in this picture above, I've spent also around 5 minutes adjusting and leveling the tripod and the camera accordingly with the vertical straight line of the door, I've just found out when I got back home and after merging into HDR that the whole image was quite apparently tilted; it is mostly apparent in the sides, while the center was a little bit off. I'm not sure how to solve this problem further.
And there is that one shot that I "stole" from my teacher. He was taking it and I told him I can do the same, so he said go ahead! It's weird how I didn't remember such point: the most interesting views are those taken above or below us. It is a true statement, and was stated as well by George Barr in his book,Take Your Photography to The Next Level: From Inspiration to Image.

City of Mirrors II
or maybe I should call it Zenith.

It was taken in front of the entrance portal (or door, or whatever it is). This HDR version in fact doesn't differ much from the RAW version, except of maybe for adding more halos to the light bulbs. My teacher here fixed for me a problem with the tripod as well, which was not being able to point at 90 degrees up. The solution was simply to rotate the camera body itself (unscrewing the base little bit). Might be shaky situation, but it was the only solution I got. I tried hard to keep the space in the middle in the center of the shot.
In case you are wondering why it is City of Mirrors II, well, naturally there is a first one that I didn't mention here.

City of Mirror I

I won't go through all the details here with the tilt in the image as well; I guess you know it by now. However, I had to pick my location carefully in hope my reflection on the glass won't appear (and guess it didn't so far!). The glass translucent, making an interesting pattern from the inside and the outside mixing them together in a surreal look. Maybe this is one of the fewest things I like about the city life; architecture. There were some issues with the clarity of the image as well, but oh well, this is a typical problem with my 18-55mm EF-S lens. Now, thinking about it, could it be that I see things tilted because of some barrel effect? 18-55mm lens DO have a barrel distortion and I've tested it before.
There are other shots that I might keep for myself or add them here later on. But one day after this event, I got that surprising call for a session in the Grand Mosque; a perfect place for a panorama!

II. The Grand Mosque - Mosque Magnam:

Maybe I'm not that so-religious person, but surely the Grand Mosque here is a chance not to be missed. The whole thing was a hassle in the beginning, but rewarding later. Even my teacher was surprised when he got a phone call saying that we were granted a permission, as he said. It was a last moment phone call.
Anyway, because I went to work with no intention of photography work for the rest of the day, I had to sign for a short leave as soon as I got that phone call about the session, just to avoid the apex of the jam here. Went back home, prepared my tools, and then after a one-hour rest I headed to the capital with ALL my tools. What are all my tools?

• Backpack: containing my camera and all my lenses and filters (with the adapters of course), and also contains my little spiderpod.
• Tripod and panhead.
• Lateral extension arm.
• Manfrotto 303SPH VR-head.

For the time being, I don't want to talk about the weight of these things. It is not a pleasant memory! As I headed there, I was the first one to be there as usual, and remained there till others arrived and my teacher as well, and I, alone, waited for something around one hour in the outside.
As we went inside, the first thing to do was to do the hardest part: the panorama. There will be plenty of time for single shots later on.

Mosque Magnam

It is not the first time to work with people going around; I've already done that in Ireland, in the Ardeaglais Cormaic in Cashel Rock. However, here it was a bit harder with fellow photographers since some of them had to remain in one position for minutes and I have to give them their own time to take their shots.
This image you see above is done in a haste in fact because I wanted to put it here as soon as possible. There were lot of stitching errors (that might be related to the moving bodies in the scene rather than bad alignment), and I might give it one other try and try to fix these stitching errors by using Blending Priority if possible.
In this HDR panorama I preferred to use the (M)anual method and put the basic shutter speed at 2", while ISO was 400. As my teacher stated in earlier classes, and in a humorous tone "... using high ISO with a tripod is an infidelity!". This is true, but in HDR the situation is different a bit. I had to make sure that the +2EV bracket won't exceed 30", and the place was low in light (the workers in the mosque didn't turn the lights on until the dusk time after I finished the panorama). There are other projections on the way, like the vertical and the tunnel-view and the little planet. All will come in time hopefully, with a QTVR.

The dome of the place was a bit problematic. As you can see from the panorama above, there is a glass cabinet which contains a handwritten Quran with some writing tools. It is said that it is a Quran written by hand by the 3rd ruler of Muslims back then. Anyway, this cabinet was exactly in the middle of the hall (where I should place my tripod eventually), and it is exactly at the center of the dome. Although I finished my panorama placing my tripod as close as possible to the cabinet, but that didn't stop me from trying to take the center in exact position. It was the time for my lateral extension arm to be in work.
The bad thing is, I didn't bring my other camera to take a picture of the setting, but anyway, it was simply done by using the later arm to extend my camera with Rokinon's fisheye lens above the glass cabinet. Shaky, and dangerous and I could have been in trouble if the camera fell down on the glass and... break it. In the beginning, as a precaution, I was placing my hand under the camera body as it pointed upward, but Rokinon's fisheye has a really wide view and I have to give my trust to my tools and leave it hanging in the air like that and bow down to avoid capturing my head as well...

Tholus Magnus

Maybe a little bit off the center, but it was rewarding I believe. Would be off with a close up zoom, but the general geometry is fantastic as well.
There were many shots but I don't want to put everything here for the time being. I'm just glad this week is over and hope of a "brighter" week. I feel sick being myself now. Wish if I can sleep, and wake up when the world is over...

Gloriae Campus

Alexander 3, V3.

Less activity behind the camera, and more activity on some experiments with photoshop. Despite the fact that my napping time screwed everything in my schedule. However, I'm trying to work more on some images from Ireland. The packet of pictures should include another 30 images, and I'm close to that number.
One interesting experiment I made, was that to spread the image of the dome that I've made previously from stitching 21 shots.


I got this idea of spreading after reading an article on some methods to catch HDR panoramas, and specifically what is called the "Skydomes."
The skydomes are mainly taken with camera tilt for 90 degrees upward and fisheye lens with 180 degrees FoV (Field of View). However, the round shape of the image made me wonder what would happen if I spread the dome that I made before in the same way? The softwares mentioned in the article were not what I used, but I, instead, used Photoshop's Polar Coordinates filter, which plots into and from polar to rectangular (the typical XYZ dimension). The result was strange but funny enough, but not enough I think to be submitted to the stock sites yet. There is a slight wavy curvature in the middle of the image, which seems to be the result of a not-perfect circle in a close-up.



The main purpose of "spreading" or changing the polar coordinates to rectangular one, is mainly to straighten out an image that was taken using a fisheye lens (be it with FoV of 180 or less), but I think it can give nice effect for circular objects like this dome (or others). I might go on testing this concept on some of the 360-panoramas that I've already made.
I leave you know with Alexander 3, V3.
__________

49. after eating with peace
50. the tribes gathered round Alexander
51. though he tried to speak to them in vain
52. they kept talking with no sense
53. Alexander gazed amid his men and asked
54. "whoever can explain the ideas between us?"
55. A man of valour then raised up for the task
56. and the name he had was Patúl
57. from a far away land called Cimcuráyá
58. and this he said, may I try and succeed
59. Alexander permitted him and he advanced
60. with cautious steps toward the unknown
61. and when the tongue he could not understand
62. and they could not understand his gestures
63. on the ground he drew a shape of a man
64. and they all said in one voice, Bulughman!
65. thus Alexander called them the Bulughmans
66. and he who seemed to be the chief of those
67. pointed to the mountains not far from there
68. and in fierce talk he started to express
69. but his words were not understood by any
70. then Alexander ordered a horseman called Carnúg
71. to go to the mountains and overlook the valley
72. and bring the tidings of what had been so fierce

Alexander 2, V1

It is not an usual thing to post in this blog in weekend days, to me at least, but here I am after finishing the stitching for the Dome's picture. It was not an easy task anyway!
Coming to some calculations and after downloading the RAW images from my camera, the shots run over 21 angles (20 continuous in a circle and the last one was a zenith), and in each angle I had to shoot 3 times with exposure bracketing, thus 3 x 21 = 63! Ta da!

The composition was not easy and I had to try many times in the past 2 days because of my damned memory limitations! All of that happened when my stitching program did not work wonders as usual and there was some mis-alignment in the layers, and working in OpenEXR in 32 bits is not an easy task for my memory. I wanted to resolve the matter with Photoshop but yet, the results were even worse because nothing could be accomplished with such memory. At the end, with some tweaking in the software itself I was able to produce some decent image with less errors and the output was saved of course in EXR format as well;



The above images (when enlarged) can look a bit of cumbersome with some spots in colors, well this is mainly because I saved it as a GIF to keep the transparent background and keep the image circular completely without any white background. Of course I couldn't be able to submit a GIF to stock sites so they are saved as JPG as well. However, there are 2 versions here because I worked with manual tone-mapping in Photoshop (the bright one) while had a trial with Photomatix (the darker one). I've submitted the two currently to stock sites, you wouldn't know what people want. In tone-mapping (specially the manual one) you can produce many different aspect from a single image. I might go over with a third trial as well with a different method.
As I prmised before, here is the second part of Alexander's story. To make it a bit longer, I shall put only a verse at a time. Today it's Part 2, verse 1.
__________

It is the morning and its glory that began
and Alexander viewed his armies from the balcony
The sun's heat was heavy on the heads and metal
and the brave hearts were looking to the balcony
Whispers became obvious, and then into shouts
the hero raised one hand high into the heaven
With a glance of sun's ray over his fingers
the crowds kept silent like preying wolves
The Alexander started the speech with praises
for the Lord of earth and Lord of heavens
Then announced the beginning of the journey
of hardships and agony, under the Eyes of God
And by the commandments of the Almighty
the crowd of armies headed to the west
Into some lands they have never seen
into some lands they have never heard of
And the time had come now to go ahead
and all shall be heading towards the west
And although the graceful mother of the hero
wept and wept until her eyes became white
By the grace of God he calmed her down
and she understood no one here shall be left
For the Earth is nothing but a revolving wheel
of happiness and agony, of life and death as well

Alexander 1 [AuliSQgunQdur 1]

It's going to be a very tiresome day. It is already at the moment of writing this post. Not because so much to do, but mainly because the sleeping problems I have.
I woke up today at the usual time, but instead of going to get me something for breakfast like I usually do everyday, I picked my stuff and went directly to my work place to snap a picture of the dome that I shot before, but this time I decided to do it in a different way. I was afraid that those security guys would block my way or something, but instead, the security was behind his desk and sleeping, and I was trying to do everything quietly. Some of those cleaners came in later and stood over my head to see what I was doing and kept on blabbering over my head gergergergerger... gosh, ever saw a silent janitor before? Here, I didn't.


For this time, the way I snapped the parts of the dome (for stitching later) was different than the previous one which was a fatal mistake. I lowered my tripod to its lowest position with its legs unstretched, and then I raised the camera by the portrait level (i.e. I fixed the camera so that when the portrait level is 90 degrees and upright, the camera will be pointing to the center of the dome). However, I think I raised the level for about 60 degrees up, and started taking 3 shots in each angle. I rotated the rotation plate for about 2 lines, but I don't know how many degrees are those! Could be 30. And for this, I have now a HUGE flow of images for circulating the whole circumference of the dome. At the end, the session was finalized with a shot to the center of the dome. The problems I'm expecting now even before the stitching process starts would be related to a little nudge to the center of the tripod from the center spot on the ground (there was a floral design in the middle of the hall that made me use it as a marker for the center), and, the process of shooting was so slow and the time was running by, and the sunrise started in the middle of the shoot, thus I expect problems with color differences when stitching already. I might need to tweak the WB abit as well.
I shot also some shots for a device in one of our labs and for some samples containers (for artisitc use if possible!). There was some nice ideas chasing in my mind while I was walking outside of the building. The cloudy weather we had for 2 days now is nice for some "drama shooting", but I really didn't feel like it. But I preferred to stay here and correct some spelling mistakes in the English version of Alexander's story VI.

For today, I will start posting parts of Alexander's story starting from the very beginning, down to the 6th part.
__________

(1)

Once upon a time in the dusty past

when tribes dominated and hatred spread

the destiny was waiting and waiting it was

for the man of might who will come and unite

so destiny chose a man called Alexander

far away from the land of Caqobia

king of kings whose father was Pilippánút

ruled with just and spread the wise word

the kingdom of Caqobia now is unite

the kingdom of Caqobia now is mighty

(2)

five years since the seat of Alexander

the poor man worked hard and slept less

a mighty army he made out of dreams

from tiny ants to so huge men of courage

and Alexander did not forget his Lord

the Giver of life and the Giver of might

and despite his weakness at night

he stood up right bowing to Almighty

(3)

One night when the stars were witnesses

a soft sound arrived from heaven by darkness

calling with a soft voice that shakes the heart

Alexander!, Alexander!, stand up! and listen to me!

Alexander, O faithful man of might and power

raise up and identify Me to ignorant people

thus Alexander rose up at the time of dawn

and the shields he got ready and the swords

(4)

The trumpet of gathering was blown

and the bugle of war was shouting

the men of might then stood before him

like how the force of day obey the moon

and in a courageous speech did he announce

'O men of valour and courage at times of heat

the commands arrived to me and so shall I go

to spread the wise words of God all over the lands'

(5)

Thus, armies are organized and made ready

twelve they were, and full of shields and armor

and each had ten thousands men ready to fight

full of muscles and covered with iron and copper

and the twelve generals were ones of noble state

and had famous names and loyal to their causes

Chinchán, Ishkán, Chírán, Érán, Dómí, Tólímí,

Kahrímí, Gehámí, Shakrashom, Dartalom, Keríhom and Galgalom

Stimulus

Quiet weekend. Not going out or anything but sitting here facing my photoshop and mangling with my photos. I woke up at almost 9 p.m. last night and stayed awake until the morning of today. Diarrhea was attacking me now and then. I think it is a consequence of the change in weather or the wave of dust we had lately here. However, by the morning time and just before the sunrise begins, I started the engine and went over to the beach beside some restaurants there to try to catch a glance of the Kuwait Towers and convert the images into an HDR. Boy, was I sick of the situation! Kids and families were sitting there before the break of dawn and playing soccer as well! The most amazing interaction was, when I was pointing my camera in some direction and then suddenly and icecream guy looked at me and just stood there and not budging. I know what's the definition of being rude but this guy can be set as an example!

However, I left the beach in a hurry as I couldn't catch much and the sun started to rise already. I think HDR are best when you have a dark atmosphere somehow and not to catch photos under plain lights. This is my impression at least. I might post some photos for the Kuwait towers later on though.
After leaving the beach I was heading to some market to buy some stuff for my own breakfast but unforutnately on the way I felt such a severe pain that made me get a U-turn and head back. On the way back though, and despite the pain, I decided to stop a moment after I glanced some view that captured my attention, and so I decided to snap it. Of course, after snapping, the work at home starts:

The picture above was taken from several angles but I think this is the best angle it was taken with. At home, the picture was composed into HDR and then several processes took place to enhance colors and give some other effects to the image. This scene reflects the old and the new Kuwait and whether we are building or knocking down our heritage to be a nation without a history. The old muddy house below dates back somehow to the 1950s at least, judging from the way it was structured.

Last night as well, and since I was not going out anywhere, I spent most of the time playing around at some of the photos I took of the dome, that I snapped on the 12th. I had a problem since the best image I had and composed into an HDR was in fact not centered and the right side of the image was cut. After many, many, many trials and hours of working on it, I think I got a fine result by now, although I can't say it is as pretty as the one I did before and posted in the last entry. This image was composed of sticking and gluing parts of other images together and doing a short panoramic merge for 2 images and then taking parts from other images to fix the lost area. After all, I took the complete half (left side) of the image and tried to complete the right side with it. When all failed because of the light and shadow in the image itself, I got some success, when I converted the image into a rectangular coordinates then back to polar (guys who deal with photoshop know this from the distort menu). This move filled in some empty spaces in the image which made me crop it later on with some equality on the sides.

Just few hours ago, I was also working on the panoramic view, taken from the same hall of dome, and despite the colors, it had in fact lot of noise and remove them I had to sacrifice somehow with the sharpness of the image, which makes me reluctant a bit to submit it to stock photos sites. They are hard to accept such "normal" photos even! The real size of the image is supposed to be 240cm tall and around 110cm wide, and sorry can't convert this to feet right now!

Notice that the "pipe" looking thing at the top of the image, is in fact the pillar that was just behind the camera. The photo shoot was running from the ground level (at 0 degrees) and I was pushing the camera upward for few degrees between every shoot. At the end, when the camera was at the final position (90 degrees) you can see the result is a pillar going on the top of the image!
i have to make some cleaning for the images taken in the past 3 days. I have 3 folders so far and the PSD (photoshop format) files are mixed with JPGs. The size of the 3 folders reached almost 2GB!!! I have to remove stuff, and store it the usual way in its own folder to be packed later on on a DVD, but that does not mean my work with the dome is over yet. I'm still planning to look more into it so I might get a new idea and new construction that can be made with what I have so far.
An idea just occured to me, I might make a shoot of my own work place from the outside. But such a building is a sensitive place to be posted in stock photos!

It had been some days now and I didn't do any work with my Alexander's story, which made this blog more like an artistic place for photography and not the conlang of Ayvarith. The translation is almost stopped. I have to think of some way to stimulate me on writing more of the translation! Now, with my partner's coming back from vacation, I think I might have some time for myself and try to write down both, the Alexander's translation and the Blackened Image story. The month of fasting, Ramadhan, is on the doors by next week or so, thus I don't know how am I going to do, specially that I need some stimulants (coffee, redbull, ...etc). I pray my mood would be in a better situation by the coming days. Mood is very important in writing, and for this I didn't write any poems lately, and my pace with other activities is downed. All what I'm waiting for, for now, is my vacation...

Experimenting...

1. A quiet day relatively, with a visit from my colleague, who is officially in a leave. However, I was almost going to cancel this day from my schedule and sleep more, since I stayed awake late last night (technically, stayed awake until today's dawn) and had a sleep for 3 hours only and was almost going to be late from my usual going-out time. When I was just leaving I remembered that I was planning to take photos from inside in one of the buildings in the campus. It was so damn tiresome to just get back to my room to bring the camera and the tripod after reaching my car outside. I didn't even go to buy me something for breakfast the usual way. I just flew over to campus directly. After doing my fingerprinting thing in the same building, I got out the tripod and started to work. Some cleaning guys, who were the only inhabitants alive there, kept on staring at me... like an alien! Well, I kept my nerves down with that.

I had some difficulty as I wanted to take a photo of the dome with some depth (not depth of field but the dome with some of its surroundings), so I tried to lower down the tripod as much as possible to work with it. Of course because of that, I didn't know what I'm catching, because I wasn't able to look into the viewfinder and snap. As as I said in the previous post, it was a chance to check for HDR's capability in this case. HDRs aren't good in general with moving objects even if the movement was tiny... it can show clearly on the image after combining the layers. Anyway, after many trials, here and there and changing a bit of the position of the tripod, I think I got satisfied with the list of photos I have in the current time. The building is there to be snapped at any time!

Going then to my office, I ran the wizard's wand (which you know by now) and started to work on the photos and boy, did I not want to crash my laptop down. I think I do need a new one now with some 4GB of RAMs if possible. In fact, my work on this laptop was just to experiment a bit and not to add a final touch, as the real work will begin at home. On location however, I got the idea of trying a panoramic shot as well, but this time length-wise and not width-wise as it is usually taken. I did photomerge these photos with my laptop but the work was done so slow and yet it was cumbersome. I need to check back at home with more advanced tools with it. After working around a bit and converting to HDR, I loved to do just a tiny experiment and saved the image as it is in 32bits, as a TIFF. The size was 90.8MB. I laughed. I deleted the file. Ta Da! However, still, I got back to reality again and coverted the file to JPG and made a tiny fix in colors to get the final touch on one of the scenes:

The rest of the work will continue at home. Although I wanted to write down some lines in my story but unfortunately, I was swept away and I'm writing these words in a hurry before I leave the place. I have a game, and photos to work with allllll day...

2. Now, after getting back home, I feel a bit energetic to work with my new photos! That reminds me to recharge the cam's battery... I need to buy another battery and another CF memory card. It is just embarassing when you feel yourself into the shot really and then your camera just stops focusing correctly! I tried it! The charger sucks anyway. Couldn't fit it into the electrical exntesion in my work place so I had to wait til I get home. The first thing to do now is to work on the photomerge, as it is a hard task to me still, then I shall work on the HDRs a bit and play around. Guess won't have a spark of ideas to write down anything in my story today. Ah well. Pass.