3D Hunting...

Been a lazy week on one frontier and a busy one on the other. Lazy in the sense of my own projects, and sort of my photography, and busy with my work place somehow. I've been roaming around looking for chances to get a scholarship, again. I stopped looking for some time because many events took place and I was not in the mind for it but I'm in again and trying to find my way around. Still, there are many places to ask in. All of that gave me no time to write a poem, which is annoying really because I do have a sort of a wave of feelings, but yet, I can't write them down for the lack of words. A line or two and that's it. Also, been looking around for some other host to build my Ayvarith page, since the discovery I've made, which is: Fortunecity, sucks. I can barely upload some images there; no audio, no clips, no MOV files and probably no SWF (flash) files as well? The thing is that publishing the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story online via WDC is on hold, because I need to add these vocal samples, which I need to dumb online first. I'm still looking and didn't make a decision yet. There are lot of webpage-building websites with ready-made templates, but those don't suit my needs.

Grabbing my backpack wherever I go, trying to get my eyes on anything I can catch, but with not much to be done. I'm trying to get back to the 3D realm, that time when I used to take pictures and convert them into 3D anaglyph (red-blue) images, but so far, I couldn't find good subjects. Only once though, with that scene from the beach...

3D Infinitum

I'm on the look for more appropriate subjects, and taking my backpack of cameras and lenses and the tripod wherever I go almost, even to work. At home too, trying to come up with something, but the trials aren't always successful. Not successful in the means of having my own satisfaction with it. You can tell I spend so much time alone and have nothing to do, yet my mind is in turmoil and barely able to do anything. It's like being paralyzed "ethically". However, doing more trials with my Tamron 70-300mm telephoto macro lens, I remembered that I do have an old collection of seashells that I've collected from the nearby shore, and it was a thought, long time ago, to take a close-up for some of them. I had to settle it down somehow (and it hard, because I didn't want to use glues) and went on shooting (with brackets of course)...

Seashell

I had to stay away from my self-made softbox for about one meter or so (~3 ft), and I think the zooming factor is good, having in mind that the shell is actually the size of my thumbnail (or less). One of the hardest things in the image above to settle down, was the White Balance (WB). With HDR tone-mapping you can change the WB as you wish but also the original WB used plays a role, and I think the original was Daylight WB. I figured that Daylight WB is more flexible to change when doing tone-mapping after doing HDR. Having Tungsten or Fluorescent WBs (i.e. cool temperatures for the images) makes the original images bluish and when tone-mapped and changing the WB to something close to "hot colors," usually the images end up with a violet or purple hue that, most of the time, won't be suitable for the general mood of the image. However, doing this, will still require some extra work for boosting the contrast and tweaking the general temperature or fixing the color balance, and all done after tone-mapping in Photoshop. I tried to do some 3D effects here but, unfortunately, the fact that the subject is in a softbox and not much of an interesting background makes it really dull and useless to do it in a 3D anaglyph image.

How to do a 3D Anaglyph? 

Just some steps that you might want to try out to make these things, but remember it doesn't work all the time because it all depends on the composition of the image and also depends on the visual capabilities of the viewers themselves. Have in mind that you will need some editing software like Photoshop. I believe some other freeware stuff can do. So, here we go:

1. In this process you will need to take 2 images of the scene to mimic the human vision; one left-eye image and one right-eye image. You can do this by 2 cameras if you like, but for me I always go with one camera and after the first shot I would pan the camera (or rotate it around its body axis) for few (not much). This distance in few degrees is just to mimic the distance between the two eyes. You can as well simply, while standing in the same position and being stable, move the camera's viewfinder (if you are using it) from your left or right eye to the other eye and focus on the same subject. Remember, there should be one object at least that is the center of the focus in the image, because this point of focus is important for later process. Having this idea in mind, you can go around with your tripod if you like for more stability, if you like.
2. Now processing. You got your images correctly hopefully (and maybe you'd better be shooting in JPEG rather than RAW but the choice is yours). In Photoshop (or any other software) you should open your images and layer them one upon the other. You should mark carefully which one is for the right-eye and which one is for the left-eye. You can check for yourself easily as you notice the relation between the focus point and the background; things tend to shift to the right when viewing with the left-eye, and vice versa. Put the right image on top.
3. Reduce the transparency of the top (right-eye) layer to 50%, or to whatever suits your level of vision, and now drag your layer around to make the focus point coincide with the focus point in the lower layer. Remember, it is not necessary to make it 100% perfect, as there might be some difficulties coinciding the two foci. The major idea here is to make the distance between the two images as minimum in that particular area of the image (parallax error?), while neglecting (somehow) the rest of the image for the time being. Once this is done, get the transparency back to normal (100%).
4. Now, the setting is Right on top, and Left is below. Now take the Right image and suppress the RED component (I'm supposing you are working in RGB color system). This can be done in Photoshop by pressing Ctrl-L (or by using the menus to get to Levels command, or by adding an adjustment layer of Levels over the Right image). Once you get the dialogue box of "Levels", change the drop down menu from "RGB" to "Red". Now, move the White arrow at the bottom (not the one below the histogram which corresponds to highlights, but the lowest one) to the far left (or simply put "0" in the number box). Thus, you will have the black and white arrows all together in one place and your image will look bluish. Make a mind connection here: Right <=> Red channel. For me, I got the habit of using adjustment layers and I don't edit the images directly, thus whenever I use them in this case, I make sure I use the clipping (right click the adjustment layer itself and it's there). This will make sure that this effect will affect the layer just below the adjustment layer and nothing else. Just in case.
5. As you did with the Right image, you will do with the Left image below, but this time you have to suppress the Green and Blue channels, and your image will look reddish.
6. Change the blend mode of the topmost layer (Right image) to Screen. You image now should look something similar to what I've done above. Crop the excess on the sides as you wish, though I prefer you do it with respect to the aspect ratio between the height and width. To crop with respect to the aspect ratio of the image itself, pick up the crop tool and mark the whole area of the image. Then, move the corners as you wish but while pressing the SHIFT on your keyboard to ensure that the ratio is preserved.
7. After cropping and everything, your 3D image should be ready. Try it out and view it through the special glasses if you have any. Remember, you might want to try it more often to get some satisfaction and not every scene is capable of producing some astonishing results. To my experience, I think spherical objects have the potential of giving out great 3D view.

 On the beach still, trying to go out there specially in the times of low tide to fish for some chances. I was lucky one time which kind of sparked my mind on another purchase on the list of my endless dreams...

The Observing Heron

I was working on my monopod (because the tripod was fixed inside the car to take some videos while driving) and it was sort of flexible with me, with its 3 mini-legs expanded. The monopod was collapsed o its minimum height and using the full zoom of Tamron 70-300mm and switching to Macro focusing as well, I had some how a nice shot of this fella. I took so many images (of course not bracketed) trying to get everything i can from his own movement over the surface just before he flies away, and then I would sort them out back home. The weather was dusty and didn't help much in this, but at home I picked one image and did the "magic" to eliminate the yellowish hue and enlighten the body of the heron. Herons by the way are immigrants, but by time they somehow settled down in Kuwait. This is what I've been told by someone in the know. Despite the dust that day, HDR imaging somehow improved some images as well...

Infinitum II

Processing the previous image was not an easy task for the level of noise that was present with tone-mapping. This is one awkward point in doing HDRs. You have to develop some strategy to overcome this somehow and after all, several ways might not work at all. Been receiving some attacks on HDR images and that it is not a real photography, and I'm tired of explaining myself that my goal is doing something beautiful and HDR is merely a technique for me to extract as much details as possible out of the scene. Strangely, in the last image, I did things unconsciously. After I got back home I remembered the advice of Alain Briot in his book, when he talked about capturing interesting lines and shapes, and specially the S-curved lines.

Also, this short trip to the seashore in the last weekend made me find out a fact about the Tamron lens I have; it has a tendency to show some strong chromatic aberrations. Now, this is somehow contradicting my own belief that wide lenses are the ones that exhibits such phenomena the most. I've read somewhere that it's a common feature for wide lenses and fisheye lenses to have chromatic aberrations specially if the object is back-lit. You would find some thin lines of red (or magenta), blue, cyan and yellow around the edges of the object. This is exactly what showed up in some of the images I've taken with this lens. Fixing it should not be hard task but when HDR technique is involved, it is worse than solving an equation in physics. HDR, and because you are combining several exposures, tends to somehow intensify the effect of the aberration and adding some contrast. Hence, it's hard sometimes to remove it with the usual "lens correction" procedures provided in Photoshop or any other software. I did go around it sometimes, but still it is not a practical mean nor successful all the time. One of these procedures is using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layers to suppress the magenta or cyan channels and confine these changes to the edges of subjects in the image. Photomatix, my favorite so far, got an option to remove chromatic aberrations from the RAW files as it combines them into HDR, but this option seems not quite the useful one here. It doesn't work most of the times. Maybe the best thing is to give up the RAW (and the stored dynamic range in them) and fix these aberrations in RAW then convert the images to TIFF16 format, and start the HDR from that point. One of the ways to go around this, is what I did with this image. Simply, converted to Black and White:

Terra Algae

The sun reflection from the water surface was strong even in a dusty haze, making all kind of aberrations around the edges of the rocks on the ground. Final solution I had in my mind is to give up colors and go Black and White! So much green in the image anyway and it sort of lost its magic in my eyes.

Currently, I've been worried about my tendency to be an "addict" to chocolate. Now with my life style like a single guy trying to do his own food most of the time, I do tend to eat some snacks rather than "real" food, and most of the time, it is chocolate. Well, I do change to candies but that's seldom. It's chocolate all the way. To be more specific in fact, it's only one brand that brings me joy: Kinder Bueno! Can't have my enough of that!

I do cook sometimes, say thanks to the microwave. The guy who invented the microwave got to be

a single guy as well. Turkey sausage wrapped in egg (stuffed with cheese, tartar sauce and cucumber with some spices). 

All done in microwave.

Majorly now, all what I have in a day is one meal, and the rest is just bits of this and that and some snacks. In fact, once I get back home I don't feel like eating (probably because I've already filled myself with chocolate and candies in my work place). Most of the time this one meal is a dinner; be it a simple corn flakes dish, or some cooking I do when I have the mood for it, or simply and order or a take-away.

It's Thursday now, TGIT. Hopefully, I will try to take a second try on shooting the Chinese restaurant from the inside as I was planning. Few days ago I was there as early as 7 P.m. just to reserve that corner of the restaurant for my work but unfortunately, there were already some people there in that specific corner. Maybe I should work late, despite the fact that the owner wanted to show the dishes on the table to add "life" to the image. However, that night I got several shot from several angles for the restaurant from outside, but none was what I aimed for. The long exposure time and the large f-number (small aperture) made it hard all the way.

Golden Chopsticks

Although I used somehow a small aperture to make a star effect as you see, but seems my choice was wrong. I think the star shine effect is not good in such a scene, or maybe it was way too hard on the scene. As you can see, the cars didn't spare me here. Some of them even had the mind to come forth and then go on reverse in front of te camera (the big white beam on the left). Unintentionally, the speed-lights covered the number plates of the cars in some nice effect. I don't want to expose these numbers to the public!

I took images with my 15mm fisheye and 18-55mm, but this one was the most appealing to me so far despite all the wrong-doing in it. It's taken with the fisheye, as you can tell from the edges of the image. The WB here is set to Tungsten, but the scene didn't go bluish in an ugly way. I should memorize this lesson now as I might as well use it for shooting inside, which has a reddish atmosphere as well. The WB here emphasized the bluish trend for the spot lights at the top while keeping the main building within its hot colors atmosphere (reducing the red a bit of course). Next time, I will try using a larger aperture (small f-number) for fast shutter speed, and to avoid the star shine effect which is not appealing here. I hope I can do this tonight.

I leave you now, with two videos. First one is one of my trials with time-lapse photography, with me going back home from work. The camera was programmed to take a shot every 2 seconds, and to minimize sizes and make sure that the memory card will take it all, I've changed the settings to shooting in medium sized JPEGs only. In the traffic jam who knows when will you be reaching home!?

The FPS (frames per second) here is 10, and I made several versions to check for the speed, and probably this is the best one. At the end it gets fussy because of turning around like a bee trying to reach home from the other end of the street. However, the generally quality is reduced of course for web purposes.

Secondly, I leave you with something I got addicted to at the moment. Old stuff (relatively), but addiction-trigger, to me...

Brain Squeezing...

I think squeezing my brain trying to find out some words to pin down was sort of successful. I had to surf the net a bit trying to find new ideas and new ways to break the writer's block, and maybe the most and easiest solution was: take a walk. Of course my main course of walking is during my working time, and now with the semester being over, the campus is almost empty and the weather is nice and helps a lot on taking a mind journey. My first trial was finalized and called it: My Golden Days. Another trial took place then after the next day and I could hardly squeeze my brain for the past 2 days trying to find the words, but then I remembered, a poem or a lyrical piece isn't supposed to be "necessarily" long. It is just how you feel, and hence I finalized a short piece called Send Me An Angel. The rhyme in this latter one might not be a strong pattern (abacc), and it does sound weird even to me, but surfing the net a bit I've found that such patterns do exist but mostly in old folk songs. I do imagine though if this is to be a song of some sort or played somehow, it's going to be a slow music tone.
I do understand now how writing is so difficult I guess, specially when you have all the feelings but not enough words in your mind to put them down, or the ability to shape your expressions. I would be able to write single sentences but to stitch them all together in some sense and rhyme, this is even harder than stitching a panorama!
I also got some positive feedback on my previous piece, The Beggar of Nothingville from one of the judges in one contest. I'm not so optimistic though that I would win even though I got 5 out of 5 stars for this, but the important thing for me is to expose it to as much as possible, hence I posted it again in one of the contests after checking the regulations of it.

On the other hand, started to upload the Ayvarith transliteration of Alexander's story into WDC website. Along with that process, I'm trying to unify the notations of writing which I changed by the last chapter (chapter six) of Alexander's story. The process is giving me a headache as well, naturally, because there were lot of typos as well. Some words I'm trying to check again and they are not in the dictionary! Well, I must have been trapped in my own trap; going around some words by using parallel expressions. If you are wondering what that means, think of it that way: instead of saying "I went downstairs," and in your conlang, you didn't make up a word for "downstairs," you might as well say "I went below by the stairs." Long, I know. But this is the way I used to go around some words. The process of evading some words is essential as I think though. It helps on creating a trend of the conlang as it is a language by itself, a stand-alone, not mimicking the grammar and the order or the ideology of other languages. Somehow, in the process of creating a conlang, you must always check that your mind is isolated and not completely dependent on some base. In my case, I do need the base; somewhere to begin with the conlang for sure! That's why I make up words and take up some aspects of Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic.
I'm thinking as well about adding some sound files. This is to explain some of the pronunciations of the sounds to help on reading the transliteration texts. I might as well add a reading for the story itself in Ayvarith. I did some before, but I think I've lost the files, and now I have to work all over again (with some corrections added this time). I think WDC allows for some audio files to be added somehow. I will have to check and see. Meanwhile, I'm working on the website slowly, but seems Fortunecity, where I keep some files now, has a problem with the FTP upload. I remember in GeoCities, the FTP option was allowed for paying members, but in Fortunecity, it says it's for free hosting members as well. Unfortunately, I tried the FTP and it's not working well. Error in password always though I checked it over and over again. The new design I've made is simple but yet contains lot of GIF images because of slicing the main image in the facade, and I will have to upload every single GIF image (after creating a folder inside) if I don't use the FTP client.

Trying to push myself to be busy somehow, even though I do have some games waiting on the queue line. On Sunday, and right after I got back from work with no appetite for lunch, I decided to drive out again in my Seat Altea 2006 and do some washing for the car, and then I headed to my work place again just to park the car there and do some panorama from the inside. I spent like 20 minutes trying to settle down with the tripod inside the car. It was a so damn hard process. In the beginning I tried the monopod in fact, but it didn't work at all because of the extremely horizontal 3 legs it had at the bottom. Finally, with some stretching, a tripod was fitted in somehow and I started to work and moving from one door to another in order to move the VR-head in all directions. I made the panorama without a zenith or a nadir, because generally I don't have an aim for a QTVR. It was just a trial. It took me already one hour or around that to take the panorama with car turned off but lights on inside the car. Made me worried after all this time about the battery; it could have been dead by that time. After finishing the work with the panorama, I've noticed that the tripod's situation is a good one to even shoot a video inside the car! I thought of turning on the video and going around driving till I get back home, just as a trial as I never ever had any experience not interest in videography. However, it is interesting and I'm going back to read the manual for my Canon EOS 7D and learn more about the basic functions. I recorded a bit more than one minute successfully until I got out of the parking place and out of campus, then the tripod's leg got loose and the camera fell down to one side. No great harm, but I was upset of this betrayal!
Back home, the stitching process was sort of smooth, but not completely out of errors and broken lines. Before taking this panorama I tried to pull the camera back a bit instead of the "center" position which is the default setting, and probably, the broken lines, are caused by this pull-back. So far, two versions are stitched: flat spherical and a tunnel (ant view) one. Lot of work was needed with the clone tool to correct the mistakes and other things!

Seat Altea, 2006.

I think, however, that the ant-view (or tunnel) view is not that good, thus I will stop my trials with that and be satisfied with what I have here, so far! I think I could try this again with another car. The question is, would my plans for getting busy most of the time would work on braking down my daydreaming process a bit? Frankly, I'm not so optimistic about it. Maybe a mental process is more useful to brake those ideas, like thinking of a line to write in a new poem. This is what I'm trying to do recently but no hope. It's like I'm keeping my mind busy for nothing, and soon, I will escape to another world.

Maybe some people who read this now would say I'm exaggerating about the daydreams. Well, let's think about it a little: 10 minutes in the bathroom just to wash my face sometimes (and sometimes forgetting what I wanted to do there even), driving completely unaware of the movements around you, the inability to focus or concentrate on the long run, specially when reading something (greatly affected me during high school and college), and sometimes even talking or making a gesture with no sense. Now, if you think the things I'm mentioning previously are serious enough, then, I'm not exaggerating my fears from daydreaming.

However, trying to put some effort with my pictures from Ireland. I feel that I've almost done everything I can with those pictures. I do need to work on the camera more somehow. Anyway, after the "likeness" of my Tunnel Effect for the playground from Bayan park, seems that I will be visiting the old panoramas from Ireland and try to stitch them in that projection and see if there is any interesting results. Also, I will work on them in Adobe 1998 color space, as some of these panoramas were done before in Pro Photo (my beloved) space. The first of those to be visited was the Ardeaglais Cormaic (Cormac's Cathedral on Cashel Rock):

Ardeaglais Cormaic (Tunneling)

Usually, when doing a full spherical panorama, I do consider stitching the panorama in 2 projections: the flat spherical, and the little planet. The little planet projection was, I thought, more suitable for panoramas taken outdoors where you can engulf the main structures with the sky that you would be taking in the panorama itself, but I was wrong. The little planet projection proved to give interesting results when done for indoors panoramas as well. Now, this consideration for the LP projection, encouraged me to add one more projection to the list of "must be done," that is, the Tunneling (or Ant View as I called it before) projection. The tunneling projection (also a term coined by me. I don't know if there is a specific name for this) is simply the reverse of the LP; in LP you look from above to the scene, in Tunneling you look from ground level (or from below let's say). Compare? Would be fun!

Find your way around

I will post this now, in hope of doing something interesting with my camera in the coming days. I'm studying (or let's say general reading from the web) more of lights and other camera aspects, as well as looking for some opportunities to upload the BIG QTVR files (50MB+ in size), and show them to other people. I leave you now with a Scottish tune that I liked so much and been listening to all week! (you don't have to understand a thing just enjoy the music!).

Alexander 6, V57.

There are some days when you start them, just in the very early beginning, you would ask youself simply, "Why?".
Been encountering bad dreams, about some dead people and seriously, it kept awake all night. Diarrhea in early morning, which is not sort of typical and usual. Car overheating later on and just finished adding water. I wonder what will come next when this day is over completely. I''m sort of used to such days on Mondays, but now I was wondering what's so special about this day that I had to start it like that? And then, AHA! it is the 13th of the month. It's not Friday, I know, but it is still the 13th!

However, there had been some obstacles in my work with my gamma lab QTVR. I'm still wondering how to add a nadir to it. Also, the fixes maybe aren't as good as it appears. Sometimes, even after reaching this level, I still think of re-take the whole thing again with a different setting or method.

Trying to have fun for the time being. No REAL work yet, and by work I mean Ayvarith work and Alexander's story. I've uploaded some font files into my fortunecity account for future use in the creation of the webpage. Spent some time thinking on how shall I do it and I think I've settled down on making the whole webpage with a vertical frame panel, and not like my previous webpage on GeoCities, which was mainly horizontal. Nothing is done yet with anything related to the HTML encoding though. Before making the webpage, I have to add words to the dictionary and organize them, and it is time then, I guess to start building. Along with that, I might start checking the Ayvarith transliteration of the story (with a sharp eye as much as possible) to fix (or more like adapt) and unify the grammar or spelling of some words, or the orthography of some others, since there has been some stuff of that that changed along with time. Add to that, a contemporary check-up for the Grammar page that was done before must be in due along with that.

__________
1345. The smith went silent after the mention of Birbuár
1346. and Alexander felt that he did something wrong
1347. but Shdáyur answered: only a Shágí can do that,
1348. this is because it is a soul that got rid of the body,
1349. thus it is free of the bounds of our world
1350. then Alexander said: if so, then I might need some food,
1351. I am a stranger in these lands and might get lost
1352. and the smith replied: yes, verily you will need food,
1353. for the journey to that place will take three days
1354. and Shdáyur prepared the needs of food for Alexander
1355. and supplied him with water to drink, and washed his body
1356. then he provided him with a tool to use and said to him
1357. "take this it will be beneficial for you my friend,
1358. it will direct you where is the east and west,
1359. thus, you shall know how to head north"
1360. Alexander asked: and what do you call this?
1361. Shdáyur replied: we call it "compass,"
1362. oh then how did you find directions in your world?
1363. Alexander replied: we had a sun and a moon and stars,
1364. and all of that helps us in finding our way, day or night,
1365. but you have your own ways in these lands of yours!
1366. then Shdáyur picked the compass from Alexander
1367. and showed him how to work out with it
1368. and after a warm farewell, Alexander left undercover

Alexander 6, V29.

One heck of a morning. Thousand trials to get into my internet account here in my work place, and MSN keeps knocking me off from the network I'm already upset for the results I got after stitching my Guest Room panorama which was not, the least to say, good. Adding to this fuss, a device in my work place went into inhibit state during the weekend and thanks to my colleague who did not foretell this, since he is the one who took care of it for some time now.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on the Guest Room panorama. In the weekend, I've started to stitch the panorama after adding control points myself in PTGui and trying to render the optimization in good results. For people who don't know, control points are the points of matching features between 2 images, by the computer analyzes the features in each image and try to blend them together in some way.
After I got the O.K., let's say, from the optimization process, I started the stitching process and this time, for my arrogant nature, I've set the scale to the maximum dimension possible for this panorama... 25,000 pixels by 12,500 pixels. The stitching, literally, took over 32 hours approximately! The result of this was an image in OpenEXR format, sizing around 830MB, which could not be opened by Photoshop or Photomatix at all. Anyway, I didn't delete the file and kept it like that, and worked then on a smaller panorama which was rendered and stitched in one hour or so. The results then were never to my satisfaction. Too many broken lines that I can't clone out or fix by Photoshop. In my desperate situation, I started to generate a template from stitching a reduced series of images (of the same panorama) that were in JPG format. I wanted to perfect the stitch for this one only, and then apply the template on the larger form, the HDR series. Alas, it didn't work as well and still the panorama had many broken lines.

The Guest Room, or as I called, the Golden Room because of the tone-mapping effect by Photomatix.

Maybe the broken lines aren't apparent in the small version, but in the larger one they are. I don't mind the broken lines in the flooring and tiles, but there are hard broken lines that MUST be fixed and fit properly in the decoration of the roof, the glass door, and the edges of the rugs. I'm thinking seriously of running the shoot again, but this time with my camera in landscape position. I think is what is causing the whole thing; the camera was in portrait position. The funny thing though, I've forgot to remove my slippers during the shoot and hence, as I announced, iti s the most important aspect of my image! I named it kuchi kuchi!

Kuchi Kuchi

Why this name, don't ask me. It just occured to me like that. The next time I shoot I really should enter this room with bare feet. I sought help from Photoshop to at least stitch the JPG files, and it was like a hoax. The program froze and hence, "end task" was the solution. I'm not willing to try again now.

For a spark of a moment now, I remembered that I still have images taken from Ireland and not processed yet. I should take a go on them now, specially with the lack of objects that I feel like taking pictures of.

Been thinking today of the writing work that overburdens my back for some time now. I didn't write any poem for some time now and this is too much really. I feel I want to write something and there are words crossing my mind but I just can't make a string and rhyme out of them. I renewed my account in www.writing.com today and eventually, I purchased a lower level account, since I'm more like a casual visitor now and not like what I've been before one year.
I've been thinking as well to post my Alexander's story there along with the transliteration texts, but they do need a spell check up of course, for both sides, the English and the Ayvarith text. Of course the Ayvarith text is the latinized text and not the original Ayvarith text! The only available original Ayvarith text is actually handwritten on A4 papers, and I might consider scanning one or two of these papers and post it here. They are full of scribbles and marks and correction marks..etc. They are a real mess.
For the time being, and until I finish the transliteration of Alexander 6 story, I decided already that my new homepage (in Fortunecity) shall not be including Flash contents, if possible. Too bad I won't be able to make sounds work in an easy way like in Flash, but well, it will keep me some time for myself later on. The thing I have to think about for the time being is the façade itself. I'm so awkward when it comes to programming languages and those HTML stuff, but I'll try like I did before and made the Flash webpage in GeoCities before.

I received one joke this morning. One of my pictures was sold on Fotolia. I really forgot I have an account there even. The purchase was somehow big; an image of the palm, in XXL size. Along with that, they sent me some email asking me to check my personal data and see for some tax information in their website. I looked a bit and, I got really sick of all that text. I'm looking at it in some other time. Even if I was not living in US or even a US citizen, they say I have to deal with it. They are withholding 28% of the payment, as I saw in their website under my sales report. A tax taken from someone with 5 dollars in his account... voila!

__________
673. Alexander looked amazed at the dead man
674. he was breathing hardly because of the dust and exhaustion
675. he raised his head and gazed around him slowly
676. and in front of him there was a shade of a man from afar
677. the stranger man had a bow in his hands and covered his face
678. and with some steps he was walking to Alexander over some cracks
679. Alexander became ready for another combat
680. but the man of the nomadic costume showed his face
681. and under the dim light of the moon Alexander gazed
682. and with a loud voice he did shout: Utéfah!
683. thus Utéfah smiled and shook the hand of the hero
684. but the hero remained silent and did not know a thing
685. Utéfah then wanted to calm the hero down from his amazement
686. and started his speech: did he hurt you with his poisoned dagger?
687. the hero replied with some stuttering: yes... no... he did not!
688. then Utéfah said in a calming voice: it is over do not worry,
689. this man was Shalmún the son of Yáhúv the son of Inaf,
690. his father was a murderer and his grandfather was a thief,
691. he inherited the manners of his ancestors and went after you,
692. for he heard what you and Ázilis, the blessed, said together,
693. and he thought you are after some treasure in the desert,
694. thus I followed him when I did not find him among the men,
695. verily he was a man of treachery,
696. verily he was a man of no manners.

Alexander 6, V20.

It is a tiresome morning indeed. I had to run with my camera here and there just with my arrival to the work place, in order to finish some stuff for my friend before the arrival of my colleagues and, the security people. Maybe I have to do some extra later on, if my friend requires so!

Been trying to find a suitable location to dump my files for the Ayvarith website as a beginning, but none was there. Angelfire and Tripod were not available for free as it seems (both under Lycos). Homestead had some good choices, unfortunately it is not completely free. I did that some days ago, and I shall continue later. There are some websites that I really cannot tell if they are good or anything, since I didn't hear of them and, some of them seem a bit awkward just by looking at the website address! I need somewhere, with no less than 15 MB space, for the time being. After all, I think I've settled on Fortunecity, it has a free service and it offers 1GB! Too good to be true to me!! But well, We'll see what will be going later. Right now, I'm doing nothing, just will dump the files whenever I'm having some time for this.
Afterall, I think I'm going to design the whole thing again and maybe do some sounds clips again, hoping that they become clearer than the other versions before that required the RealPlayer.

I think I've underestimated the abilities of Photomatix. Last Thursday I was out with a friend by night, and I liked the view of that restaurant by night, and when no one was around, except of few cars of course belonging to the night bats like my friend and myself. It was funny though how we tried to set up and shoot; we went around the parking lot that was far away a bit in circles around just to find a nice spot. Finally, we got that spot but with the tree in front, but it was OK to me, since other angles were worse, far worse, than this one.

 Our favorite icecream place

I had to sit at the back just behind my friend and turn off the lights of the car, just like spies snapping photos of their prey! It was a hard shoot; no tripod and no stable hands, plus to that that I had to use my telephoto. As a rule, if you have a telephoto and worked on a zoom, then any simple shake to your hand will be apparent in the shoot later on, and needless to say that even the mirror inside the camera (which clicks up when you press the button) do shake the camera a bit. That's why there is an option in these cameras to "lock up the mirror".
Hence, you can imagine how it went while I was sitting in the backseat trying to snap the building with that telephoto. I tried to sit in many different ways just to stabilize my hands without using the tripod, yet my trials failed. At least, I got 2 shots of different exposures that were fine.
Back home when I downloaded the images, I decided to try out the 3 main shots, with the brightest being the shakiest (since it is the brightest which means a longer time for the shutter to close and open again, i.e. more shake). With Photomatix, it was almost like magic; most of the shake is gone. Some noise would be apparent in a 100% close up look for sure, and I think this is even obvious in what so-called, "stable shot". But this time, the shaky part is indeed like almost gone with no trace. Could it be that, somehow, the exposure information are extracted from the RAW file and fixed up to the general image without having to adapt the features of the image itself? I wonder. Afterwards, cleaning and contrast boosting was done, as usual.

By coincidence, I found out that my poem, O Shannon, was published in www.writing.com in some newsletter sent to other users for St Patrick day. I received a message in the websites internal email system about a review made by a reader. Judging from the rank (a number beside the nickname of the user) I can say it was a high ranked user. They liked the poem and told me it was in the newsletter, which I usually delete. How embarassing. He forwarded the newsletter back to me and found it under "Editor's Pick" column. I think being published in a newsletter is awesome, somehow it means like your poems are read by "high ranked" people, i.e. those who make out these newsletters in the website itself! The funny thing is, although it is about something Irish, but the newsletter was about Romance and Love. Is memorizing the childhood considered something romantic? I really don't know, but anyway, it got published that way!

Still in Ireland and its stories, I've finished the first book from a list of books that I got from Ireland last October. The Irish Ghosts book, by John Dunne.

The cover of the book I have is different by the way. Now, after unpacking the other books and some of them were just TOO much to read, I realized here that I have another ghosts book, this time by Geddes & Grosset. I don't know why I bought two already, but well, this should be fun I guess... I hope! This one looks fatter in contents, and maybe that's why I did take it in the first place! There are books on Irish music and Irish dancing (or a story of the Irish dancing) and a book about the Irish myth. This last one is a tough one to read. SO FAT.

__________
457. the hero got ready for a hand combat
458. then he tried to view clearly the face
459. and he found out it was but a human like all
460. while the stranger approached with a smile
461. and from under his cloak he grasped something
462. then said with a harsh slow voice like a nomad
463. in a weak Caqobian tongue
464. "is this what you are looking for?"
465. and the stranger showed the Charnagút
466. then the stranger continued the speech
467. while Alexander was checking his dear Charnagút
468. "you suffered so much from the desert,
469. and fever attacked you like locusts on green leaves,
470. then you fainted near our place"
471. and Alexander praised God for His grace and said
472. "thank you O generous one, but you speak Caqobian,
473. how did you know I am a Caqobian?"
474. and the huge man laughed and said with a smile
475. "you think we do not know the Charnagút?
476. the sword of just that was once for Pilippánút,
477. the fair king of Caqobia, who protected us long ago,
478. and this tongue is spoken around by the literate
479. along side with other ayvaric tongues of other tribes"
480. then Alexander forgot his pains when he heard of the Ayvar