Mental Stack…

Finishing with February, and now March begins with the typical pressure and stress for the many activities I must get involved in. Now after the ending of the Italian Style contest, I think it is OK to post my work here. Beside that I've been busy with February's project, as well as working with March's project. Adding to that, a Comic Con expo which we got involved in, and submitting images and orchestrating our participation in Austria's International Photography Contest (Trierenberg Circuit). Just reading these titles makes me feel exhausted already.

Settimana Italiana

I've talked previously about this contest related to the Italian Style Week (or simply Italian Week). Every participant is allowed one image into the contest. I've posted one 3D rendering of a shot some weeks ago in this blog (in B&W) but nothing more I think, so I'm going to post more shots from a single place in which I've worked for this contest: The Scandinavian House. Well, despite the name, it does have Italian furniture!

A Game of Scopa

First comes my participation image. It was the first thing to work on as I got in, and I've spent quite a time to center and put on some props (clothing and Scopa cards), and by mistake, I've placed a traditional rosary (for men) behind the vase which made it mostly invisible from that angle. The image didn't win anyway, probably because that Italian elements are not prominent in it. Anyway, the work is still going on to render more projections out of this panorama, which I might post more of in this blog later on.

Planeta Scopa

Moreover, later after shooting this panorama, I've wandered around to see any opportunities. Just recently, I've discovered a shot that I've made with my converted camera without using any filters, which I've neglected previously for its lack of interest and other technical problems. However, I noticed that I've shot it a number of times and with some shift in perspective, which sparked the idea of creating an anaglyph out of it. Which I did!

Il Vaso (3D)

The white balance here was fixed during the edit which rendered the colors back to normal (almost) as if it was taken with a regular camera. It is a hard task to make a concrete anaglyph using a fisheye lens, thus some ghosting effect is still obvious at some areas, but probably focusing on the edge of the vase or the rosary would pop the effect out.
Another shot was taken raising my Rokinon 8mm fisheye high up above a long table, being on a tripod itself. Took several shots to pick one from and then the shot undergone a distortion fix process with DxO. Not quite to my liking though, but I tried hard to keep some lines straight and the bowl round perfectly but that didn't go well it seems. Yet the shot was too simple and I didn't submit it to the contest of course. It might serve as a concept for minimalism though!

I Biscotti

Then there is the previously posted in 3D shot, which I've re-processed from a single RAW this time. Looking at it right now, I wish that I've shot it with my Canon EF 50mm at f/1.4 or f/2.8 at least to have more of a blurred background. However, I've this shot using Voigtländer 20mm, at its widest aperture at f/3.5. Good perspective and sharpness (even though manually checked), but the background needs more blurring to reduce the distraction away from the glassware. I did crop a large portion from the sides just to reduce the distraction and balance the image more (but not perfectly).

L'Urna

In all, this might be all that have been interesting for me in this place. Now, I'm busy working with other projects still and preparing many other things.

Feabhra

February (Feabhra) was the month of the national days (Independence and Liberation days) on 25^th and 26^th. For this reason, the project for this month was to be about Kuwait in general. To roll back the memory a bit, our group now had established an activity with this year's beginning, by picking a topic (sometimes by vote) for every month, and members involved in this activity must shoot from 1 to 3 images in that picked up theme.

بلداً آمنا (Safe Place)
Canon EF 50mm, f/2, 250^-1sec, ISO160.

Flag of Kuwait

My first trial for this project was with my mother and her colored rosary resembling the flag of Kuwait. I needed an old hand to resemble the old age which, for the time being, is often attached (mentally) to wisdom and faith; beside the fact that the rosary is hers given as a gift! I've taken several shots (and had some struggles with my speedlite). At the end I've picked this shot. In all shots, I was setting the focus point at the Arabic word [آمنا: safe] and as I was changing the angles to see a better view, the word just vanished from sight at times. However, I've struggled to satisfy myself with the depth of field, and finally decided to settle with f/2 here. The critical point though came after, when friends brought my attention to the fact that the rosary is encircling the specific phrase in the page (with a meaning almost the opposite of what I wanted in the line above); which delivers a meaning not what I really wanted in the first place. Anyway, now I've been busy with other things and I have no time to re-shoot this, but if need be, and if required after the critique, I might shoot it again.

Kuwait Print
Canon EF 50mm + ET, f/22, 250^-1sec, ISO100.

My next shot was inspired by a logo. A logo which was used for the Martyrs Bureau; an institution which was established after 1990-1991 war to take care of the affairs of martyrs of Kuwait and their families. The logo was composed for a fingerprint sketch colored with the flag's colors. I've used face-painting colors here on my brother's index finger, and though I did a random sketch and splashing, it did seem appropriate to have a more organized set of colors (which he did paint later on). The  real struggle was with the bulky tripod and lens (with extension tubes). To add to my frustration, I've added a rail to the tripod, while pointing the camera 90^o down (I wanted my brother to place his finger on a table top so his muscles would be relaxed). I thought of doing a focus-stack in the beginning but shooting at f/22 seemed just about enough (using one speedlite on the side). Even though I do own a simple LED ring light, but when it comes to f/8, its maximum power is barely enough, not to say at f/22! Thus, I needed to use a speedlite with its maximum power or so, at a close distance. Modifiers here were hard to use so I had to depend on changing the direction of the speedlite and play with its power a bit to get a proper exposure (with the help of the processing power for RAWs!). Looking at it now, I think I should have made it in portrait orientation instead.

Kuwait Eye
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/9, 1/2sec, ISO400.

RoundFlash
Source: B&H

The last one in the list was the real puzzle. Using a high power flash made the flag's reflection disappear from the eye, while reducing the power did not help with the exposure (and eventually would need a longer exposure in parts of a second and that caused shake). In the beginning, my brother was my subject, and I used his iPad to reflect the flag from it on the eye, but he couldn't cope for long with the strong flash strikes. Thus, my sister took his place. Using light modifiers didn't help either. It was obvious that I needed to take the shot with ambient light and without using any speedlite but that was hard because of the shake. By trial and error, I've finally got a somewhat better view using the RoundFlash and raising the ISO. It was a compromise, since the reflection of the light ring did fall on the eye as well (naturally) beside the flag. Up till this very moment, I'm thinking about fixing this problem but no solution occurred to me yet. Many people insist that such effect is in fact a graphic editing, but I'm sure there is a way to do it (beside having the subject wear a contact lens with specific design, which is a harder option for me of course). I'll keep thinking about that and we'll see what will be the result!

Finale

Now, many things are weighing on my shoulders; at home, work, and the group. It seems to me that those psychological tricks to do things one by one and not thinking about the overall load - seems these tricks are not working with me here. I'm slowly saying goodbye to winter, which is a sad time for me actually.
Our group is participating in a Comic-Con expo for 3 days and I will be there helping other members for some time, so I might document the event; If I had the mood to. For the time being, I have to keep thinking of some more ideas for March project: Geometry via birds, fishes or fruit. Quite challenging, but I have some ideas already. The real challenge now is actually doing these ideas and having the materials available! I'm trying to keep my mind busy here; as busy as possible. But I'm not sure I would be able to hold that for long…

Fortunati...

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

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

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

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

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

Leopard Whipray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overdose...

A slow day. I was almost about to give my back to work and sleep again. Although I slept earlier yesterday, which is something that soundsl ike a miracle, but still, to wake up this morning was like a torture. I had some neck pains for some time. I have a long queue list of photos that people want me to change or do something about and Im totally running of ideas, and my mood is getting low down that I can hardly focus. I discovered yesterday that I had a game that I didn't play yet, and installed it but didn't feel like doing anything about it. But still, yesterday was a good day for writing my story. I wrote a big portion relatively, in the second chapter, and just put the final touch before leaving my work place. I think I spent one hour typing without stopping. Also today, I had an idea for writing an 8-line poem for a Bite-Size contest in www.writing.com, and I called it 1798. It talks, very briefly, about the Irish rebellion of 1798, which was put down few months later brutally by the British forces at that time. These short poems I rarely post in my Poemhunter account.

After arriving back from work yesterday, I stayed and worked on my new little design for my niece. It isn't much of a thing though because the original photo was not good enough, plus the noise thing and the background which made it hard to separate the subject, but some people already liked it:

The line reads: In principio, non vi è stata la bellezza. Meaning: In the beginning, there was the beauty. I hope the translation is correct, and thanks to uncle Google!

At the moment while I type these words, I feel my blood pressure is rocketing the sky. Seems I've taken some overdose of caffeine or something. I had some Redbull and coffee yesterday by night, and this morning too, and I won't cease to drink soda anyway as long as I am at the work place. I stopped fasting for the time being and it helped me out now to stay awake in the afternoon time, when I usually sleep if I was fasting. This day seems to be idle so far, and my head is so heavy. I'm thinking of giving myself a little holiday next Monday, for my birthday.

I just remembered that I was planning to get my camera and tripod to the campus today, but unfortunately did not remember this until this very moment of writing this entry! My memory sucks. I was aiming at taking a photo for a dome of one of the buildings in campus, which is relatively a new building. The good thing about it is, there is a spot on the ground marked with some floral design, thus you can easily fix the tripod in that location and flip the camera for 90 degrees and shoot. It would be a good chance for an HDR experimenting.

HDR image combined by photoshop from 3 different exposure rates. The image was taken in one dark winter night, or after midnight, at 3 a.m.
For a printable size of the same photo, please visit my portfolio in www.Canstockphoto.com, simply by clicking the signature down.

Belleza Bendita

Today was a day that ran like a train in my life. Beginning with the early morning in the office changing samples and running devices, and then I spent a plenty of time working with photoshop over a photo of one cute girl (no names to be mentioned) that I called, Belleza Bendita. I made a mistake though in the design as I typed "bendito" instead of "bendita." She is a girl from somewhere with latin and italian roots, so imagine the shape! :)
Belleza Bendita means "Blessed Beauty." This is just what I see in her, and the most fascinating thing, in the whole thing, is the hazel eyes.

Later this morning, I had a call again from the Irish embassy asking me to fax some papers. They called me back on Wednesday asking me to do the visa online (which is something I checked for but I didn't find any information in their site confirming that)... however, I had to run here and there and back home to get the papers and sign them then send them by fax from a photocopy shop.

Got lot to do with photos these days, from people and from my own camera. The photo above is a minimized version of the panoramic view that I composed on the seashore Thursday's morning. The play of colors is, of course, made up... don'tell me you didn't figure this out! The actual size is around 3 meters by 1 meter (WxH). I think that would be somewhere around 9ft by 3ft. I wonder why don't they use the metric!!! It's easier!

Beside fixing photos and doing designs with photos, there is a queue of games that is waiting, and that makes me be idle for sure from completing my story. Games have their own priorities! :)

The yield for today is 2 pages of translation. Also, I discovered a new type of mistakes this time! A reptitive number sequences! YUK!
The repetitive sequence of numbers means that the verse is already more than 24 lines somehow, so if we assumed the total number of lines (after the previous mistakes were found) is 2997, I guess the number now would be 2999... well, closer to 3000, the supposed original number! But still, more mistakes to be found I guess...

As I was trying to type something for my story I figured out that the time doesn't help now, so I went on typing this entry instead... hoping that I might be able to do something at home with my story.
I had some thought of living some tiny adventure by trying to go to one of the islands, namely Miskan, where an old lighthouse built by the british still survives there, beside the new one as I read once. I don't know how much does it take to reach that place, but I heard that I can rent one of the boats lying around in some marinas. I need to re-think about it... specially with such a hot weather now.

It's just amazing, that feeling when you make someone smile... and from one second of dispair, you do make them fly... I think being a single man until this moment of my life, is paying back in a form of virtues... despite the devil that lives within me from time to time... Alas! Life, and so shall it go...