Die Flucht…

Well, here I am, on a vacation. Finally!!! I was not going to do anything or post anything for this week, but decided on doing so after getting the chance to do some shots.
On the other hand, being on vacation is not so idle yet, but certainly more active and cheerful; even though I still have to pick Mom to and from the dialysis center. My flight is in around 10 days from now, and I'm preparing slowly for it. I'm still not quite sure if I should carry my camera bag on plane, or put it with the main luggage as I used to do in my previous travels. As for the former, it would be better for the total weight, but a havoc for the security procedures specially in times like these we are having now. As for the second choice, the weight will be more for the main luggage (and might pay extra), but I'll my head the usual security headache.

Die Flucht

I really don't know how this idea escaped, but I've suddenly noticed this small space, which according to some architects, supposedly working as a vent for the kitchen. Anyway, the space was tempting, but the steps later on were hectic and it was so hard to do a panorama in this small space, mainly for the amount of reflections involved - Something cannot be avoided!

Die Flucht

The panorama was done twice, and Die Flucht you see above was the result of the second. Many differences were there, and because of the mistakes that happened in the first, I had to reduce them in the second attempt. I will try to list some of these problems:
1. In the first trial there was a chair. It seems this chair caused lot of havoc (adding to my reflection on the glass). The chair was not completely stable and seems to have been shaking while working. Thus, I've decided to remove it in my second trial.

2. My reflection in the window is surely a cause for many distortions and misalignment. This is because of my body movement which, of course, acts like a moving body in continuous shots. However, this obstacle could not be eliminated naturally! Thus, broken lines and some misalignment remained in the second trial and I had to conduct dear ol' Photoshop!

3. White Balance wasn't much of a big deal, but I've decided to use my White Balance disc to calibrate the white balance of the place accordingly; which initially yielded better results (colors been changing as I changed color spaces and other things later).

4. Probably, but not for sure, I do need to calibrate my camera and lens combination with the VR-head again - or maybe it is the small space that tends to induce so many errors. I'm not sure, but I've done panoramas in narrower spaces than this and I don't remember so much errors like in this one!

Hello Word!
A panorama in an even a smaller
space than Die Flucht.

The only projection to hide some of the errors is the one you see above (deduced from Little Planet). Flat and others definitely won't work. The only problem here is the remains of the tripod head in the nadir point which I had to "craft" piece by piece in Photoshop and still didn't make it better, but, at least, it's not that obvious in this smaller version. For these reasons, this panorama, Die Flucht, is not to be uploaded to stock websites. The adventure inside this tiny place is not over yet though; I still had to come up with something...
Meanwhile, I do tickle the idea of using a wide angle lenses inside narrow spaces - the results are kind of unpredictable at times. Probably it is a result of the packing structures in narrow spaces, like this one. Thus, I've placed the camera on the floor (putting some plastic to protect the LCD first) and I tried to center the camera as much as possible. Using my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens, I've snapped some images in that space. However, it was not until the third trial that I got it somewhat right.

Der Flüchtling
Rokinon 8mm fisheye, f/11, HDR, ISO200.

The first trial, included that chair and it didn't sound right, specially that it was done in an opposite orientation to Der Flüchtling; which is an orientation that didn't give much space for the door on the right here. I believe that the door should have more space, and the chair in that first trial was simply wrong. The second trial was like the one above but plain. Then I got the idea to include myself. All trials were done in HDR format of course.
No flashes were used in this shot - the light was completely controlled using the HDR capabilities in the HDR slide before "baking," or tone-mapping the HDR (HDR was merged in Photoshop instead of Photomatix). Probably some halo is obvious around my body and in fact I intended to do that way for some reasons:
1. I wanted to guide the eye to two bodies here: the sky, and the body.
2. Darkening the rest of the shot was to hide some reflections on glasses (and had to do some cloning).

Using Exposure adjustment layer in HDR mode, I was able to control the light level in various areas with the help of layer masks, and with some blurring to the layer mask, I got the soft halo around my body. Ironically, I had some other ideas after I started working with this shot, which would require another trials - but probably this is enough for now. The rest of the work before and after tone-mapping the HDR was to clone some unwanted features (like a pipe and some reflections) and to adjust contrast as well as darkness and brightness of some zones here and there (while keeping the sky vibrantly blue). I have dropped the saturation for the whole image and increased that of the sky. Cropping though was a hard aspect specially that not shooting my hands full in the original made me a bit awry (yes I can be a perfectionist in such situations). However, I've decided to base my cropping on the center of the blue space of the sky (i.e. make the center of the sky is the center of the image). With this done (and after adjusting the tilt of the image), a large portion of the hands disappeared as well as my thighs, but I don't feel comfortable yet about it! Lesson learned now, hopefully.

Finale

It seems that the vacation is refreshing my appetite for shooting. An appetite that I will burst, hopefully, in Ireland in few weeks. My next move now is to stop worrying about Mom when I'm away. In the meantime, I can't stop asking myself would be there anything changed in my workplace after this long vacation? Typically, the answer is: No. But who knows.
I'm living some days with weird feelings, of joy and ecstasy merged with sadness and melancholy. Sorrow about lost days of youth, and fear of elderly conduct. I've started recording some cassette tapes that I've recorded while a teenager, in an attempt to digitize the whole set. Every song passes my ears ticks some memories and how beautiful my days were without knowing that back then. Along with that, comes memories of some hopes that, not surprisingly, been lost at most.
One particular song that I had some hard time looking for, and which really spark in me some weird feelings - probably it is the desire to live a love story - and big thanks to some users online who helped me find it on Youtube. Weird that there is barely some record for this song, and here I leave you with it…



Well, it would be appropriate to say R.I.P. Charles Pettigrew. Wonderful song, from a wonderful time.

A Struggle...

A week messier than the one before! Frustration, vexation, a heart attack, name it whatever you want. Any term that gives a resemblance to "annoying" would work perfectly here.
I've been trying so hard to do things prior to this post to be able to put some work, but I kind of failed, but hey, I tried! But the thing I'm regretting the most is, not being able to work on a simple task as recording my Ayvarith texts.

To start with a failure, I was trying to take a panorama on a low level. The new tripod gives me new and interesting capabilities (and yes it is made in China), and for this I was trying to work with a panorama in the bathroom, again. The location is chosen for a certain idea that I wanted to imply, however, there was one difficult task to come over (and I couldn't); The tripod legs. Simply, impossible to clone out, unless of course I would decide to work for one full week on cloning them out. Despite my trials to rotate the set from above and take the panorama again with the legs of the tripod out of their former place (and then overlap the 2 results), yet, that didn't work quite well and PTGui didn't help (nor Autodesk Stitcher which I don't know how to use still!).

The setting in the bathroom!
The floor is clean don't worry! :)

Another work had to be done in my work place. Now it's Ramadhan and the working hours are shifted and shortened generally but however, I'm still on my same routine. Not affected and hope to remain like that till the end of the month. Anyway, I try to finish whatever I have to do in the lab by the early hours of the morning just to do whatever I like the rest of the day. If only I can bring my PC to work to do something about these images and panoramas!
Last week I did take a small vertical panorama for the corridor but when I got back home, the process was hard to be done and to stitch, hence, I decided to go on and do it again last Monday but this time, a full spherical panorama. I think I got my lesson now from all of this. Always go for the full and then part whatever you want.

Branches
Despite the fact that it's not a full spherical panorama, this vertical panorama taken from under an arch of bushes and then cropped. I realized that I almost done a full panorama here minus some few angles.

- Struggling With Failure:
Back to the main headache of this week for me. A panorama from my work place, and specifically from the corridor of labs. As stated before, I took a limited panorama from there before but I was mistaken not to make it a full spherical one. Also, this time I decided to take the whole panorama with (M)anual mode instead of the (Av) mode as I usually do. In brief, the process is about metering the highlight and shades in (Av) mode to check the shutter speeds, and then choose an average shutter speed in (M)anual mode, and that way you will make the exposure time to the camera more constant time-wise, making for a smoother transition, as it seems, as you move your camera while taking the panorama, from highlights to shadow areas. On the other hand, the WB was set manually to about 3300K, instead of relying on the presets of WB that already exist in the camera.
This time I tried hard to take a shot of the Nadir point but things later on were not that easy either. I've been struggling hard to achieve a suitable blend but seems I need more work with my tripod. I went through much fluctuating between Photoshop and PTGui trying to fit the Nadir point in its place.

Nadir shot taken after moving the tripod away from its original place. Not a good shot!

The idea in fact is simple, and I've read a lot of documentations online and from the PTGui help so that I might fit the Nadir point perfectly. The idea is simply to stretch the Nadir shot which I took from an angle (after changing the tripod position) into its place on the completed panorama. This simple idea, was not simple to do at all!

Asylum
Vertical panorama.

As a brief discussion for the colors; here I tried to add a dirty look resembling asylums and places of maniacs that we usually see on movies and such stories related to psychos. My main interest, in general from the very beginning, is the linear shape of the corridor and that is what drove me to do the panorama (twice). Yet, when it came to the tone-mapping and fixing colors, the philosophy in the mind begins. Seems I do have a certain pattern of thinking when it comes to such workflow: Notice, Shoot, Add philosophy with colors.
Back to the nadir, here, you can see the middle block in the vertical panorama is totally covered. Not perfectly covered though but compared to my other trials, this is considered superb, I guess.
It turns out that my VR-head, Manfrotto 303SPH, is not one of the best VR-heads available. Not because of its weight, but probably because of its size. By coincidence and as I was surfing the net to find a solution to my nadir problem, I've discovered that MY common problem of having parts of the VR-head into my shooting process is in fact, normal. Other people who used this very same VR-head did suffer from the same problem, and if you are not going to make a QTVR, then this should not be a big problem; a simple crop would do the job.
Yet, my main problem is, I insist on doing this and I wanted to add a nadir point to make a suitable QTVR. There is always, however, an open option for me to create my own nadir which is something common as well: a title block.
In the processes that I've been through, which were so complicated and so memory-exhaustive, I've learned many things for now, but that does not compensate for a good nadir shot. There are methods mentioned on the net for such way to shoot the nadir, but lot of them are impractical. I've learned some new options in PTGui that are said to be helpful for nadir stitching (like Blending priority) but they were useful for other ideas in my head. After all, I've managed to stick a fixed and isolated nadir (from an original angled shot) which did not fit perfectly, but yet, to me it is a glance of hope...

Asylum II
The isolated and fixed nadir was way larger than the piece I wanted to cover.

One of the problems that occurred here while stitching (or after actually) is the weird splashes of colors that are not originally there. There had been some odd blue bands, and you might see them as well even after cloning (never been good with cloning!). I'm not sure what causes such weird colored occurrences, but it might be the process by which I took the panorama or the effect of the original WB? Thinking about it now I really can't decide how to research this topic! And to add to the drama, Photomatix is still acting weird for adding white spaces to perfectly aligned images!
Finally, there was this simple QTVR (I didn't do QTVRs in some time now), in which I've forgot to turn on the option that says "360 panorama" when tone-mapping in Photomatix. For this reason you might notice a sudden change in shades as you rotate in the QTVR. You need the latest QuickTime plugin to see the QTVRs on web. If you downloaded QuickTime and installed it already, the plugin is supposedly installed already...







The final twist to the epic of such panorama is, a tunnel view. I was going to make a little planet projection of the scene but it turns out that it does not make much difference to the vertical panorama that I did before. Thus, a tunnel view projection is more interesting I'd say!

Asylum (Tunnel View)

It was a struggle indeed. Made some advancement and got some failures as well, but let's hope I did learn my lessons here. Originally, the images were stitched on relatively larger sizes (not relative to what you see here but to what have been submitted to stock sites), but after all I had to compromise and give up some space to have mercy on my PCs memory.
All of this work got me back to a spark of memory in my head, when I used to be an active member somehow in the Wild Minds network; a network dedicated to Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD). The vertical panorama specifically, which was the first in this series, got me back to myself to realize that I didn't do much against my MD habits. The ups and downs in my life got me even deeper into this. Getting closer to 31 in few days does not make it any better as well, as socializing is already harder for me to do. Maybe I should get back to the network, to people who are, to some extent, like me... just wondering where to this is going...

Salute, to such a hectic week, with a little dedication inspired from the essence of the strokes of bad luck during this week...

Busy Life
Long exposures (25") layered  with "soft light" blend.

What a vacation...

What a busy week. It was a good thing that I've decided to take a leave from work for one week to do all the business related to my car leasing back again. I hate cars, this is for sure.
After 3 days of struggling I managed to lease the same car for one extra year and this time no automatic deduction via the bank but I have to do it myself, manually, either personally or by online. I hope their online service is as reliable as they said! The bad thing is, when I tried to pay for the first pay by visa, the card didn't work there and I had to pay by k-net (i.e. directly from my account). Judging from later events and how I used the visa card many times in many places afterwords, I got a feeling that I was fooled by the guy behind the counter. The visa card worked perfectly in several occasions and never failed to!


However, I had this little semi-vacation for myself; sleeping as much as I want, but yet I had to wake up early most of the days in this passing week. I had a plan to go to Miskan island alone yesterday but I didn't feel like it and I preferred to stay home (and in fact I slept afterward), plus the weather was (and still) windy. Might not be a good time for cruising in a ferry.


However, yesterday was not a completely idle day just like that in fact. I woke up in the morning and went out of home just right after the morning prayer and up to Soog Sharg. Don't remember that place? Well, here it is:



I had a plan earlier to take a photo for the parking lot just in front of this mall. I liked the view of these columns carrying light lanterns with a background of purple hue at dawn, and for this, timing was so very important.
I speeded up my way to there and parked some where as much isolated as possible and went on clicking with my camera in many angles and then finalizing my work with a hasty work of panorama. All shots were taken with bracketing exposures between -2 and +2, and I was flipping the aperture size here and there. The light was strong since I was close to one of the columns so I think those images taken with a large aperture were not so much what you would call, innovative. While those with smaller aperture made a star or a sparkle around light sources.

Large aperture (small f-number)

Smaller aperture (high f-number)

The disaster in fact was, when I got back home I discovered that all my shots were taken with ISO 800, and that gives a big amount of noise or grains, so I had a hard time combining the images for HDR (which increases the grains almost like triple) and working on cleaning them and such (which is never perfect anyway specially with such large number as ISO 800). Photomatix was not much of a help in fact because the noise levels became so much exaggerated and its internal "noise reduction" did not make any wonder. Thus I had to refer to the typical HDR merging in Photoshop, which I don't like much, but I had to.

As for the panorama, and because of the problems mentioned afore, it was also a hard task to make one and also it is not perfect at all with many errors. After all, I gave up the idea of combining HDR images (in OpenEXR format) and stitch them together, but I got a hold of the +2EV sequence and that, to my eyes, was the best solution. As for the errors, I tried to do my best with Photoshop but yet, it was not much of a good work. It is sad to see nice colors gone that way with erratic stitching (and mainly because of my lack of proper tools);





The funniest thing in all of that was the security guys in the place. In Kuwait, you can't take a photo of your own house I believe without a permission of some sort. When I finished shooting the panorama and was on the go and collecting my stuff, this security guy came to me asking me where do I work and whether these photos for some magazine or for some newspaper, but I just replied with "I'm a hobbyist, and this is for myself". The guy couldn't do anything and just wished me good luck! I went into my car blasting with laughter!
You might think that a permission is needed indeed because it is a private property, but it is not. It is a public parking lot and a permission should not be necessary, specially that no trade marks are shown in the image or anything. However, I got away with it this time, I don't know if I can do it another time though! Imagine yourself being a hobbyist and required to make a permit for everything that your eyes see as beautiful... this is ridiculous.

In the mean time I'm still not finished with Ireland and the Irish beauty. There are still some issues not settled about some of the images and panoramas. Panoramas taken from Ireland are a critical matter since I can't go back and take the pictures again, so I try to spend more and more time with my images and try to make them as much acceptable as possible. At least to some viewers.






Some of these images are repeated as I added them beforem but this time I think they got more enhanced colors. Not all people appreciate the weird-looking tone-mapped HDR images, so I try to keep them as much natural as possible.
On the other hand, there was a great deal of a chance to make my first spherical panorama (i.e. 360x180) but again because of stitching errors and technicality, I had to reduce this dream to simple 360 panorama. The panorama is for the small tower in Aughnanure castle from the inside. The panorama makes the space looks so wide open, but the truth is, I could barely move inside with my camera!



Also, while flipping through many of the effects and coordination systems, I discovered that I would get some nice effect with a "circular" panorama (not spherical);



It has that nice look for peeking through a keyhole I guess! Now this panorama is what I call a hard stitching process. It took overnight to be done. I know for prefessionals this time is nothing, but to me and for my humble poor PC, this is too much really.
With this, I should try to examine all my choices when I do any panorama even if not a 360 one.

As I'm not going to go out today, I might write some words in my diary which I didn't write anything in it for long time now (since my back from Ireland!). I shall see to it if I can do something about the translation work with Alexander's story... if I had the power (or urge) to. I'm almost close to finishing it and I hate the feeling of laziness just when the work is about to be done. But this work, when done, will open the gates for a heavy load of work to be done later, specially with the awaiting website for Ayvarith conlang.

TGIT...

This is a perfect day. Rain and winds rocked the place! Amazing!
I spent the last night working on some images here and there and I've began to understand more about the panoramic shots and why I get errors when I merge images together. Unfortunately, most of these errors are somehow unavoidable for my case, since it required special instruments to rotate the camera around certain axis, and they cost so much.

Alpha and Radon counting lab

The Previous shot was done in 360 degrees and I cropped in the middle to avoid the excessive mistakes from the stitching process. Still some errors might be visible anyway in some corners. Another image that was disastrous with colors as well, was for the Gamma Lab:

Gamma Lab

I made the white balance here into a bluish hue and increased this hue later on after the stitching process, but I think this was not a good idea. I feel the image is not consistent with dark and light areas in general, while some spots are too dark (even in the original large image).


Despite these bad experiments, I got some nice results by mixing one image of different white balances into one by using "exposure fusion" facility. The result was weird and yet, it contained lot of Luminascence noise even after the usual filtration. But I do look at it from some artistic perspective after all;

Alpha Counter With Open Sample Doors

It got a mix of blue and white mixture and I think it is pleasant for the eye in general. But yet, the picture that made me happy was none of the previous ones, but it was one that was regular, but I was happy to achieve such effect with this;

Alpha Counter Doors (Top View)

The angle and the blur at the back, as I believe, give a sense of great distant between the two (actual distance do not exceed 10 centimeters). This was an effect I'm happy out!

Away from photography and the waiting list for some images to work on, there were actually other reasons that made me happy about the rain today. In previous post, I mentioned that I was planning to go on ferry to Failaka but I didn't. The thing is, actually, I made what is called "Khirah". It is to ask for guidance to make some decision by using Quran (and there are other various methods as well). When I did this, the phrase that showed to me was:

وَأَرْسَلْنَا الرِّيَاحَ لَوَاقِحَ فَأَنزَلْنَا مِنَ السَّمَاء مَاء فَأَسْقَيْنَاكُمُوهُ وَمَا أَنتُمْ لَهُ بِخَازِنِينَ

 

Translated as:

And We send the winds fertilising, and cause water to descend from the sky, and give it you to drink. It is not ye who are the holders of the store thereof. 

 

From chapter 15 (Al-Hijr), phrase 22.

The phrase speaks of winds and water or rain, yet the weather was so nice that day. Today, I was checking the schedule for the ferry again to see if there is any possibility to go today (beside work time), and seems like if the phrase from Quran applied itself perfectly for today, 2 days after from my enquiry! I don't know if there is a connection between the two, but it is something that makes me meditate into the nature of the universe and the events the surround us in general. Everything seems connected...

The yield for my translation process for today is 2 verses as usual, and I could not continue further since my eyes are almost closing by themselves. I did not make up much words for today though, and the translation process was going smoothly almost with no delay for looking up or making up a word. I've exceeded the limit of 2000 lines now, getting into line #2041. To me, it is a breakthrough, to get over 2000 lines being translated into Ayvarith. I try to say some words while writing in order to increase the grasp of the language and its sense.

As for now, it is Thursday, and it is time to take a nap in the afternoon, and go out by night, and then play some games all night IF my eyes helped me out with it!